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Cardinals of Faith 


Brief Studies for a Time of Groping 


BYS a9 
OSWALD W. S. McCALL 


Minister of 
First Congregational Church of Berkeley, California 


WITH AN 
INTRODUCTION 
BY 
DR. JOHN WRIGHT BUCKHAM 


Professor of Christian Theology in Pacific School of Religion. 





THE ABINGDON PRESS 
NEW YORK CINCINNATI 


Copyright, 1924, by 
OSWALD W. S. McCALL 


All rights reserved, including that of translation into 
foreign languages, including the Scandinavian 


Printed in the United States of America 


IF, PERCHANCE, 

YOU SHOULD FIND 
WISDOM HERE, OR GOODLINESS, 
OR TENDER DEVOTION 
TO THINGS THAT ARE BEST, 
UNCOVER THE HEAD 
FOR YOU WILL HAVE MET 


filp Mother 


Digitized by the Internet Archive 
in 2022 with funding from 
Princeton Theological Seminary Library 


https://archive.org/details/cardinalsoffaithoOmcca 


CONTENTS 

PAGE 
HOR EWORD? enlist eer Na OR ieer ete yaa Gs fi 

IntTRODUCTION by Professor John Wright 
Buckbamie wrc Aenean capeer een Ta Oar 9 
CVD peel Mee tei DG Bie ATURE PEE aR te eS 13 
LEE Nba 1 CAD, aba PRR ca ce PUD a oie VAC UR DIR 37 
LES WIS UAL IN ie ae i ei a OR gu 49 
Jesus s(Concluded) io) 2 ee ia) ee. A ahs 
PA Ee CHRORS teh isis er Gy 8, cate NR IR 78 
DUA WERT ON Nas ay eht Units © AUa Us Co regen toey aU NC 94 
SALVATION (Concluded).........5...3... 110 
PE OGOHTI ROH ee iene os bayer go wet ate a 123 
PapCuurcn (Concluded). sees foe. 134 
CARA CTE Chait ON Laem ch MI ate ith 146 
BUESVIOLIATION (en 9 8, tolls she ai ine tthe cee eee 162 
PMMORTAEIT Yo Moy i en eat ble metal OEY, 173 
Mite PININGDOM) OF GOD ef yih elise eck ets 186 


EROGRESSIONA LO Se fete Grier tere suctanca tees 199 





FOREWORD 


Most of the contents of this volume was 
prepared in response to an invitation to deliver 
a series of addresses before the Northern 
California Congregational Conference at Asil- 
omar, California, in the fall of 1922. They 
were received all too generously, the Conference 
expressing its desire that they be printed. My 
own congregation, whose unusual wealth of 
heart and mind is so provocative of new 
visions to a preacher, also listened to them, 
and a request coming that they be heard at 
Pomona College, Claremont, California, some 
of them were repeated there in February, 1923. 
On each occasion judgment that I hardly felt 
free to ignore was cordial enough to wish for 
them a wider audience. I have felt encouraged 
to add certain chapters, and to conclude with 
a forward-looking word, which I have ventured 
to term “‘Progressional.’’ The “Cardinals” do 
not pretend to do much more than glance at 
certain great truths of religion, any attempt at 
extensive survey being obviously not made. 
Yet it is to be hoped that even such brief 


glances, taken as they are in the light of the 
7 


8 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


past and the present, will commend themselves 
as having seen not untruly. Recollection of 
the purposes for which the material was first 
prepared will explain the form of public ad- 
dress it wears, which could scarcely have been 
changed without extensive rewriting. From 
no one has encouragement been so discriminat- 
ing and so helpful as from Dr. John Wright 
Buckham, professor of Christian theology in 
the Pacific School of Religion, Berkeley. In 
readily acceding to my request to look over the 
“Cardinals,” he allowed me to benefit beyond 
measure by his suggestions, placing not simply 
me in his debt, but also all who may chance to 
read what follows. And may that reading 
leave the Eternal Things at least a little larger, 
a little dearer, and life a little holier. 
OswaLtp W. S. McCatx. 


INTRODUCTION 


THESE arrow flights into the heart of truth, 
directed by a clear eye from a well-bent bow, 
need no introduction. They convey their own 
desired message in their own rare manner. 
Such few words as are perhaps needed have 
to do chiefly with the bowman. 

The Rev. Oswald W. S. McCall, of Scotch- 
Irish stock, came to America by way of Aus- 
tralia, where he was pastor of Methodist 
churches for fifteen years, service abroad with 
the Australian troops, chiefly as preacher and 
lecturer, increasing in him that deeper knowl- 
edge of abiding realities and of men, which 
was one of the few compensative by-products 
of the Great War. He left Australia with his 
family in 1921, not knowing whither he went, 
except that it was to wide-welcoming and oppor- 
tunity-abundant America, and for purposes of 
Christian service. He was intercepted on his 
way to whatever field of service might need 
him by the First Congregational Church 
of Berkeley, California, which called him to its 
pastorate in January, 1922, under circumstances 


which have seemed both to them and to him 
9 


10 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


too spiritually significant to be of a merely 
accidental nature. , 

Our time has its own problems and its own 
preferences. Preaching has been in more or 
less successful practice a very long time—too 
long for many of the children of this genera- 
tion, who have quite lost interest in it. Yet it 
still has its age-long power and fascination— 
when the man in the pulpit is a true preacher. 
The people of Berkeley have caught in the 
accents of the voice of this spokesman of the 
gospel a note of veracity, of inspiration, and 
of human sympathy which has won them with 
an ever-stronger and more widely felt appeal. 

The University of California, Stanford Uni- 
versity, and Pomona College have all recognized 
in Mr. McCall a man with a message which 
commands both heart and intellect, and to 
their needs he has given himself with unstinted 
response. Pacific School of Religion conferred 
upon him the degree of Doctor of Divinity in 
May, 1924. 

For such as understand the true and in- 
exhaustible prerogatives of preaching these are 
sermons. For those who do not, they are 
simply reverent and courageous ventures in the 
realm of religious truth—truth which has to 
do directly and controllingly with life. At 
the same time, it seems to me that they are full 


INTRODUCTION 11 


of a well-concealed but vital and balanced 
theology. 

Their unusual quality—which only those 
who have listened to Doctor McCall can fully 
understand—lies, I take it, in their complete 
freedom as well as grace of thought and expres- 
sion, blended with a fine sense of the values of 
the revelation of the Divine Spirit to the men 
of good will in the past; their kinship with the 
true literature of the spirit, old and new, both 
in allusion and in their own texture; their in- 
sight into the deeper realities of life, and, above 
all, in their faith in God, as revealed in Christ, 
and their sympathetic knowledge of the human 
heart and mind. These qualities will make the 
volume a source of light and help to very many 
who are troubled in the midst of present-day 
doubt and confusion. 

There are here, to quote lines of Francis 
Thompson which are often upon the lips of 
Doctor McCall, “the drift of pinions,” which, 
“would we hearken, beats at our own clay- 
shuttered doors.” 

JoHn Wricut BuckHamM. 


iy 
1%, 





GOD 
I 


ATHEISM is not to-day the troubler of the 
human intellect. Sober minds, perhaps more 
especially since the coming of the scientific 
habit of mind, in most cases feel that it would 
be something like intellectual flippancy to say 
there is no God. Our increasing knowledge of 
this universe-machine may have dazed us with 
the whirr of its wheels, lost us in the com- 
plexity of its labyrinths, and left us breathless 
in astonishment and awe before its finesse, its 
delicate balances, its perfect adaptations; but 
I take it our knowledge has in no sense led us 
to say there is no Almighty Machinist. 

The universe is a pyramid pointing to God. 
Near Cairo, the visitor to the pyramids sees 
them built in layers, and one of the pyramids 
still retains a little of the alabaster that once 
faced them all; crowning the apex, the alabaster 
still points to the sky. Is there not something 
like this in the impressive testimony of the 
universe to God? First, the mineral base, and 
upon it the vegetable, and then the animal, 


each “layer” narrowing in extent as the pyramid 
13 


14 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


rises; and then the human, and higher still the 
supermen, prophets and geniuses and _ seers; 
above them, the few demigods, as Moses, Con- 
fucius, Zoroaster, Buddha, Mohammed; and 
last, nearest to heaven, the crown and glory of 
the whole, the alabaster apex, Christ. The 
testimony of the pyramid is one; each part is 
eloquent, but what shall we say of the whole? 

The intellect has its demands; less and less 
are they likely to be satisfied by atheism. 

This is so of the soberer mind. There is 
abroad a good deal of easy and pert assertion 
of unbelief which is really no such thing. A 
man’s faith is like a harp-string; relax it by 
eareless living and it will thrill with no great 
music. But let some discipline fall, bringing the 
silver cord taut with seriousness, and in that 
serious hour it will be found that it was not in 
truth broken at all, but suffering from laxity. 
A man who carries in his heart a broken faith 
cannot be pert about it. Professor Clifford, 
having definitely resigned faith in Christianity, 
pictured himself amid the glory of a spring sun- 
rise, “gazing on the empty heaven stretched 
over a soulless earth,” and realizing with a 
sense of utter loneliness that “the Great Com- 
panion was dead.” 

This sort of doubt is very different from the 
ready denials we meet, but this is the only 


GOD 15 


sort we can respect. For no one can be an 
atheist indeed without much reflection; but to 
reflect upon the significance of atheism must 
shadow the soul with horror and despair. 
Respect a denial such as that; but when you 
find a man retailing his denials with glib 
assurance, and rebutting your faith with a 
satisfaction that at times almost suggests 
gaiety, be neither alarmed at his attacks nor too 
hopeful of carrying the day against him. His 
trouble is not intellectual; it is moral. Either 
he is a child who, not yet having grown to the 
dignity of a man, cannot realize the solemn 
significance of his denials, or else he is a man 
who carries somewhere a false emphasis in his 
life, and so is dismantling that dignity and inca- 
pacitating his seriousness. For no man can 
lightly say, “There is no God!” without, by his 
lightness, publishing the hidden flippancy and 
barrenness of his soul, as if one came laughing 
to you and said, “Your mother is dead!’ Though 
it were true, yet the laughter would be an 
awful exposure of the one capable of it. 


II 


But for the majority atheism is not the 
trouble to-day. The people are not preyed 
upon by denials of God so much as by carica- 


16 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


tures of him. Our business is not the convincing 
men of the existence of the Almighty so much 
as the straightening out of their ideas about 
him. It matters what men believe about God, 
for their own lives will be affected by it. 

We are embarrassed with gods. There are 
tribal gods enthroned by the nations, making 
favorites and awarding priority; there are 
denominational gods, with special taste for 
ritual, or independence, or fervor, or dignity, 
or what not. There are gods dressed up like 
clergymen, and gods clanking swords and spurs 
in the manner of Prussians; there are gods 
who are professors in theology, bending with 
feverish interest over our disputes about 
whether the “‘t’? should be crossed or the “T’ 
dotted first; there are gods with ribbons 
around their necks like unto pet poodles, to be 
fed on pious tidbits, spasmodically embraced 
in paroxysms of religious sentiment, and gen- 
erally carried about and fondled as quite harm- 
less and pretty adornment and entertainment. 

We have gods more than we can number, and 
that is the pity of it, and some of them are 
fearfully and wonderfully made. 

Contrast the sublime impression of God left 
with us by Dante when he pictures himself 
gazing, in ‘“‘suspense and motionless,” into 
“that abyss of radiance, clear and _ lofty,” 


GOD 17 


staggering under the weight of his own concep- 
tion of God and saying, “O speech! how feeble 
and how faint art thou, to give conception 
birth?!” 

Til 


When we speak of God we mean to convey, 
of course, the Christian conception of him: the 
God of Mohammed could not satisfy one who 
has conceived of the higher God of Jesus. 
“God is Light,” pure, warm, outstreaming 
with health. This is his character, revealed 
full-orbed in Jesus, but rays of which have 
come through many sources since God first 
began to reveal himself among men. For God 
has not withheld knowledge of himself, of his 
nature and ways, shining in many ages through 
numberless intellects until we are not left 
destitute. The light, truly, is through colored 
media, but it is light, and from above, and it 
is sufficient to read by. No doubt Scripture is 
right: ““‘No man hath seen God at any time’ — 
not the undimmed beam, insufferable. Yet 
also: “He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father,’ says Jesus; aye, In a dimmer sense, 
he that hath seen the product of any elevated 
character or of any clear and honest brain 
“hath seen” glimmerings of the Father. 


-—1Canto XXXIIL. 


18 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Ralph Connor concludes his Sky Pilot thus: 
‘For often during the following years, as here 
and there I came upon one of those that com- 
panied with us in those Foothill days, I would 
catch a glimpse in word and deed and look of 
him we called, first in jest, but afterward with 
true and tender feeling we were not afraid to 
own, our Sky Pilot.”” If there were nothing to 
tell about God after so long, we should well 
question if there were any God to teil about; 
if nothing of the Great Companion could be 
glimpsed among men, we might well deny 
that there had ever been companionship. But 
now do we believe that in “sundry times and 
in divers manners” the knowledge of God has 
come, because he has ever deigned to be the 
“rewarder of them that diligently seek him.” 

Let us try to pluck some of the fruits of man’s 
long thinking and experience and set them out 
before us. 


IV 


We do not conceive of God as blind energy, 
nor as mere characterless intellect; he is a 
Person. Many of those who dispute this are 
denying something which we are not asserting. 
Personality is not physical, it is spiritual. 
‘‘Perhaps no better service for theology could 


GOD 19 


be performed by the pulpit,” writes Professor 
Buckham in his illuminating work, Personality 
and the Christian Ideal, “‘than to have every 
minister the world round stand up and say: 
‘God 1s a Person; he is not an Indwidual. A 
person is a free, self-conscious, moral spirit.” 
“But,” as another has wisely warned us, “when 
we ascribe personality to God we do not mean 
to imply that he has the limitations of per- 
sonality as we know it, but merely that per- 
sonality . . . just because it is the highest 
thing we know, is that something from the 
analogy of which we can derive the least 
inadequate conception that is possible of the 
Divine.”! No personality is known much 
beyond its fragmentary externals; a man’s 
works are the least part of him, though his 
character is expressed in them all. It is no 
wonder if the deeps of the Master Personality 
remain unsounded, though what we know of 
him is real. Who knows all that was Living- 
stone; yet who doubts that the essentials of 
Livingstone are known? 


V 


But now where is this Person, and in what 
world may we find him? “TI will tell you where 
1 Immortality, p. 79. Streeter. 


20 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


God is,” said one of the Christian Fathers, 
“when you tell me where God is not.” There 
are two truths about God which every man 
will be the richer for apprehending. They are 
not novel to the Christian thinker, yet they 
seem to require stating yet again. 

One of these is the Transcendence of God: 
God is greater than his universe. 

Years have gone since some of us read 
De Quincy’s “Dream Vision of Infinite Space,” 
but perhaps we have not forgotten his picture 
of how “God called up: from dreams a man 
into the vestibule of heaven, saying ‘Come 
thou hither, and see the glory of my house.’ 
And to the servants that stood around his 
throne he said: ‘Take him, and undress him 
from his robes of flesh; cleanse his vision, and 
put a new breath into his nostrils; arm him 
with sail-broad wings for flight. Only touch 
not with any change his human heart—the 
heart that weeps and trembles.’ Then, in 
charge of a mighty angel, the man swung out 
into infinite space, flying amid worlds of life 
and wildernesses of death, with towering con- 
stellations upon one hand and upon the other, 
suns and planets that built themselves into 
gates and arches and stairs, depths that yawned 
unfathomable, heights that reared insur- 
mountable. Suddenly, as thus they rode 


GOD 21 


from infinite to infinite—suddenly, as thus 
they tilted over abysmal worlds, a mighty cry 
arose—that systems more mysterious, worlds 
more billowy, other heights and other depths 
—were dawning, were nearing, were at hand. 
Then the man stopped, sighed, shuddered, and 
wept. His overladen heart uttered itself in 
tears: and he said: ‘Angel, I will go no farther, 
for the spirit of man aches under this infinity. 
Insufferable is the glory of God’s house. Let me 
lie down in the grave, that I may find rest from 
the persecutions of the Infinite; for end, I see, 
there is none.’ And from all the listening stars 
that shone around issued one choral chant: 
‘Even so it is; angel, thou knowest that it is; 
end there is none, that ever yet we heard of.’ 
‘End is there none?’ the angel solemnly de- 
manded. ‘And is this the sorrow that kills 
you?’ But no voice answered, that he might 
answer himself. Then the angel threw up his 
glorious hands to the heaven of heavens, say- 
ing: ‘End is there none to the universe of God! 
Lo! Auso Tusre Is No Brcinnina.’ ”’ 

It is worth calling back this picture of 
infinity that we may awe our spirits with the 
measurelessness of God! It might help to 
check certain unseemly tendencies in our 
modern religious life. If the boisterous laughter 
of Robert Ingersoll helped, by the truth that 


22 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


was in it, to sting us out of our artificial inter- 
pretations of the Bible, the soberer agnosticism 
of Huxley contributed much toward our 
emancipation from parochial ideas of God. 
We are not all free yet, however. It was with 
a scorn too fine to realize the indifferent pro- 
priety of his words that an observant “man 
in the street’? commented impatiently upon the 
way some religious folk have of comporting 
themselves before the Infinite: “Why, they 
pretty well call him by his first name!’ The 
reproof is not unjust. 

After we have gathered all we may of Him 
who has written syllables of himself in every 
heart that has cared enough to seek him, and 
in every intellect that has counted him worth 
its strength, we must return to say, “Lo, 
these are but the outskirts of his ways: and 
how small a whisper do we hear of him!” 

The transcendence of God must always 
signify a necessary truth in agnosticism. ‘“The 
reality back of appearances,” Herbert Spencer 
assures us with a finality we cannot share, “is 
and ever must remain unknown.” But do we 
know nothing of the heavens because we do 
not know all? On the other hand, our claim 
to know something is not a pretense that we 
know everything; we still go exploring in the 
starry deeps, glad of every new syllable of 


GOD 23 


knowledge we collect, in reverence before the 
brightness and the marvel, lured ever by the 
abysmal unknown which we persistently ask 
to know even if in dazed moments we wonder 
if it be unknowable. But the starry heavens 
are dead; God we believe is living, and a 
Person. In our agnosticism let us not fail to 
discern between comprehension and apprehen- 
sion, for if the first is important, the second is 
life. Whatever God is, the testimony of the 
ages is that the spirit of man -may apprehend 
him who outranges the intellect—may appre- 
hend him and by thus finding him may find 
also that here alone does it fulfill its own self. 
“This is life eternal that they may know 
Thee!’ But this knowledge is first experi- 
menta! rather than intellectual, it is devotion 
rather than definition. What myriads live by 
apprehending electric energy who never even 
begin to comprehend it! 


VI 


But this Transcendence of God is accom- 
panied by another truth, without which we 
should be left crushed and orphaned by sheer 
infinity. ‘This other truth brings God near 
again, and redeems us with hope of com- 
munion. It is the Immanence of God; God is 
inherent in his universe. 


24 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Fairbairn speaks of the people of India 
believing in a God, who, though impersonal, 
continually impersonates himself in everything. 
Impersonality is not the Christian conception, 
but impersonation is closer to it. At least the 
poets, those seers who “‘clothe sublimest thought 
in the language of the gods,” have thought so. 
“IT kiss God’s finger-tip in the spring flower; I 
feel his presence in the morning’s glory. With 
the Persian I kiss my hand to him in the star, 
my head rests on his breast in a knoll of violets 
and clover: not on wz but on him; not ‘It is 
beautiful,’ but ‘he is beautiful.’ ’’ So writes 
EK. P. Powell. But George MacDonald ap- 
prehends similarly the proximity of God when 
he sings: 


“A voice is in the wind I do not know; 

A meaning on the face of the high hills 
Whose utterance I cannot comprehend; 

A something is behind them; that is God.” 


And when Goethe speaks of nature “as the 
living, visible garment of God’ we are re- 
minded of a seamless dress that once in Galilee 
distributed healing virtue to such as touched 
it; beneath “this living visible garment’’ is 
“‘a presence that disturbs’ us, a Person re- 
sponsive, warm, redemptive, whom not a few 
have found. 


GOD 25 


Those who remember the boyhood book, 
The Flamingo Feather, with its entrancing 
picture of adventures among the Indians of 
Florida, in the sixteenth and _ seventeenth 
century, will recall how the young hero of the 
story, a French youth, Rene de Veaux, became 
the chieftain of an Indian tribe. To that tribe 
he became in some measure both immanent 
and transcendent, inasmuch as he was on the 
one hand actual and accessible among them, 
infusing them and their customs with his spirit 
till they caught the flavor of him and were 
animated by him; but at the same time and 
on the other hand, being superior, he was not 
limited by them, their manners or traditions, 
continuing distinct, and in many of his powers, 
inaccessible. These two qualities of superiority 
and indwelling cannot be arbitrarily dis- 
tinguished one from another; they are a 
natural combination in one personality. Any 
father is both immanent among his children 
and yet transcendent. Pass again to the eternal 
Spirit and intensify this immanence and this 
transcendence a myriad times until this two- 
fold truth of the Great Personality be some- 
what conceived—the untrammeled supremacy 
of the Absolute, and the inescapable closeness 
of the Omnipresent. 

“Whither shall I go from thy spirit?” cries 


26 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


the old psalmist. ‘Whither shall I flee from 
thy presence? If I ascend up into heaven, thou 
art there. If I make my bed in hell, behold, 
thou art there. If I take the wings of the morn- 
ing, and dwell in the uttermost parts of the sea, 
even there shall thy hand lead me, and thy 
right hand shall hold me.” This is immanence. 


Vil 


What is God like?—not in form, for he has 
none that we are able to conceive any more 
than we can conceive the form of our own 
essential selves, which also are spirit. But 
what is he like? Persons have character; is 
God something like Milton’s Satan, magnificent 
and terrible, but heartless? 

Though one need not lack color even to such 
a picture, there is one supreme denial of it— 
the human heart. Suspect the thing to which 
the human heart at its best will not answer. 
Keener than logic, unbaffled by mystery, 
contemptuous of the spurious, the znéwitions 
read the face of Truth at a glance. Send out 
your missionaries to tell the nations that God 
is ike Satan; produce your evidence—suffering, 
sin, disease—and, though hearing all, the heart 
of the race will answer: “I cannot understand, 
I cannot prove you wrong; but this I know, by 


GOD Q7 


something deeper than logic, and by the switt- 
rising scorn in me: it is darkly and blindly 
false!’ On the other hand, take the brave and 
bewitching picture of Jesus to men for their 
judgment. Say to them, “Look upon this Face 
and answer if God shines here.” You know 
there is not a healthy heart the world over but 
will salute the glory of God in the face of Jesus 
Christ! But that is because the universal heart 
instinctively realizes that God is good. Rather 
deny God altogether than deny his goodness. 
Paul folds his arms and gazes into the face of 
Nero, and through him into the face of the 
entire Roman power. What can it all do to 
awe one whose moral integrity makes him a 
tower before his immoral persecutors? Martyrs 
die triumphant through sheer moral sover- 
eignty. An immoral God would be despised by 
his creatures, and rightly, for he would be less 
than they. No tyranny of mere power could 
conquer one who, though feebler, knew himself 
greater, because goodness is greater than power. 


vol 


But do not enervate the idea of goodness by 
making it mere spineless benevolence. Good- 
ness is not limited to mildness. When Jesus 
weeps, or declines to condemn an erring woman, 


28 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


we are quick to feel his goodness; has he ceased 
to be good because with vibrating indignation 
he cries: ‘“‘Woe unto the world because of 
offenses’? ‘God is light’; is light good? It 
cleanses, sweetens, invigorates. “‘Let the light 
shine upon your body; it is health,’ says the 
doctor. “Let the light into your soil; it is 
nourishment,” says the farmer. Precisely; but 
what do the bacillz think about it, to whom the 
light is death? Any conception of the goodness 
of God which tends to make him indifferent to 
sin and moral disease is simply wanton cheapen- 
ing of the idea of goodness. 

Discovery of the Infinite Love has had the 
effect in some quarters of besmearing the Deity 
with a sentimentality that degenerates his 
attitude toward his creature to the level of 
doting but feeble and characterless femininity. 
Scripture, whilst abundant in mercy and hope, 
gives no justification for our enervated idea of 
God; neither does nature, nor history, nor 
conscience. These are all garments of God, 
bearing the peculiarities of his person, and 
certainly they bear no testimony that their 
Divine Wearer is a mere benignant anemia. 

If, long ago, Jehovah was pictured as lifting 
himself up in gloomy terror to hurl headlong 
his foes, trampling them underfoot and gnash- 
ing his teeth above them in irreconcilable 


GOD 29 


wrath, we must not allow our indignant re- 
action from such a picture to miss the truth 
at the back of zt. Still “our God is a consuming 
fire’ toward some, or you have emptied his 
holiness of meaning; still there is something in 
him to fear, or he is an inanity that no one will 
love; still he rules with iron hand, or no one 
in the universe is safe. In some quarters the 
God of love is so portrayed as to become as 
unnatural as a picture without a shadow and 
as insipid as a diet of saccharine. One is re- 
minded of some of those statues that have 
come down to us from the great ages of art, 
but which, more from the usage of uncouth 
hands than from the passage of time, have lost 
mouth and nose and eyes and cheeks and are 
become quite featureless. When love dwells 
intelligent in the midst of power, as in Jesus, 
one respects it and is subdued. But when 
uncouth hands strike the character from the 
face of God, leaving only an unmeaning and 
unvaried smudge of “love,” the world turns 
languidly away and goes after its devils to find 
something interesting. The enlightened theo- 
logical Canaan we hoped we were journeying to 
has turned out to be largely a land flowing 
with sentiment and syrup, and somehow we 
almost sigh for the wilderness where the frown- 
ing aspect and the sting of the hail did remind 


30 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


us that someone cared if we did wrong—if it 
were only enough to punish us! 

The love of God is not a capacity for infinite 
yielding, but it is like the evening softness of 
great mountains, where the softness reposes 
amidst granite strength. Unless this is realized 
the goodness of God can mean little either,to 
us or to the nation. For God must be allowed 
to be morally in earnest and not a trifler. 


IX 


Here, then, is the ever-present Person, per- 
feet in goodness, witnessing to himself in us 
and in all that is. But still another question 
urges itself: What is the raison détre of God’s 
creation? Behind this various universe and 
behind the fact of human being, a provocative 
Why? lifts up itself. 

“Why did you paint that picture? It cost 
you much time and patience. Why? For 
applause? For money?” 

“T do not despise the applause, yet that is 
not the reason,” replied the artist. “I need 
the money, yet neither is that the reason. I 
had to save my soul.” God is the First Artist 
and is urged by his own nature: the heavens 
are his canvas and he paints in worlds. But 
reflect that God is a person and that persons 


GOD 31 


need fellowship; especially must this be so of 
him who is the Supreme Person and the First 
Lover. Again, there is the urge of God’s own 
nature, the urge to fellowship, the imperious 
urge of love. In Scripture and on the rocks 
God has told the same story: the crown of 
creation is personality. The universe has 
sweated to produce it; by endless selection and 
labor it has provided a companion for God. 
To raise questions of possible companionships 
elsewhere does not alter the truth of them here. 
With all its imperfections human personality 
can give devotion to God and receive him, and 
not be complete apart from him. How pro- 
found, we may remark, is the responsibility of 
any soul in refusing God the communion de- 
manded by God’s own nature! For if man has 
himself become a person, and if he is built to 
find God and have him, realizing his dignity 
and happiness in him, it is deprivation to God 
and it is disaster to man for anything to pre- 
vent a steady growth in reciprocity between 
human personality and divine. God _ needs 
man, and ultimately every man must learn 
that it is only God who can be of satisfaction 
to him. But here we see that God, by all that 
he has made, principally by man, reveals his 
hunger for fellowship. Such need can be 
satisfied only by love, which, in the nature of 


32 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


it, cannot be commanded, may be withheld, 
and must always be voluntary. 

This, then, is the picture: God, essentially 
personal, infinitely great, thrillingly present, 
robustly good, hungering for fellowship. 


X 


And now one comes to the supreme climax 
of the subject, the matter that concerns us 
most and which is capable of being missed, 
though we should possess all the furniture of 
definition and correct views about the Divine 
Being. It is this: 

How are we to achieve the expervmental, per- 
sonal knowledge of God, which 1s not made wp 
of intellectual opinions but of spiritual conviction 
and fellowship? 

God is the Master Truth, and if any man is 
asking, Pilate-like, ““What is truth?’ let such a 
man be warned of Pilate’s attitude. 

In the first place, his temper was wrong, 
being contemptuous, angry, whereas except a 
man be converted from scorn and pride and 
become as a little child, he shall in no wise enter 
into the kingdom of truth. 

In the second place, Pilate’s life was wrong, 
being place-loving, cowardly, irreligious. No 
man can weave a net of logic with his intellect 


GOD 33 


and catch truth as a fowler catches a bird. 
Assets of character are necessary. “Blessed 
are the pure in heart, for they shall see God.”’ 
“Every one that is of the truth heareth my 
voice.” It is as well to recognize this. It was 
possible for the Roman to have Jesus Christ 
stand actually before him and yet miss his 
value. What had Pilate in him that could read 
the excellencies of Christ? You desire know]- 
edge of God? And think you no preliminaries 
of character are needful for such a quest? Be- 
ware lest, on a day when you complain that 
God is unknowable, someone retort: “Sir, 
thou hast nothing to draw with—and the well 
is deep.” 

In the third place the skeptical Roman, 
having propounded his question, straightway 
“went out.” Brusque termination of the sub- 
ject may suit a supercilious temper; it does 
not permit the discovery of truth. All the 
learning in the world will not compensate for 
cavalier treatment of the things of God, nor 
save such a man from being bankrupt of faith 
to the end. Be advised to cultivate patience 
and expectant persistence. It is required in 
every other study; why not in the study of 
God? Be patient, changes will yet take place 
within yourself, brought about by experience 
of living, which, if you are worthy, may give 


34 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


you keys to mysteries that are locked to-day. 
As has been well said, truth must be born 
again in every individual heart ere it can exert 
power in that life. But this sort of thing is not 
for the slammer of doors, nor for him who 
completes instead of suspending his judgment 
when puzzled in the presence of great ques- 
tions. 

There is no question greater than this: How 
may knowledge of God become a conviction 
and a potence within us? 

Illingworth! treated this illuminatingly years 
ago. All knowledge, he reminded us, is a 
process, or the result of a process. Moreover, 
even the simplest knowledge, that which comes 
through the senses, does not come without an 
active exercise of all the three functions of our 
personality—thought, emotion, and _ will— 
though the constant, common use of our ability 
to see, hear, feel, may have become so auto- 
matic as to appear involuntary. In realms of 
deeper knowledge, such as those into which the 
scientist enters, again our whole personality 
must cooperate in knowing, and little will be 
learned without emotion and will, enthusiasm 
and perseverance. 

This is truer still in knowing persons. We 
usually know of them an aspect, only—social, 


1 Personality, Human and Divine, Lecture V. | 


GOD 35 


commercial, artistic. Love or reverence some- 
times tempts us deeper, but in proportion to 
the depth and greatness of the person or 
character in question is the difficulty of really 
coming to know him. To know a man as he is 
—his true motives, the secret springs of his 
conduct, the measure of his abilities, the 
explanation of his inconsistencies, the dominant 
principles of his inner life—this is often a work 
of years, and one in which our own character 
and conduct play quite as important a part as 
our understanding. We all find that self- 
revelation is possible only to another for whom 
one has affinity. Plato, the spiritual philosopher, 
saw more profoundly into Socrates than could 
Xenophon, Socrates’ companion in arms. 
Though sleeping under the same stars, what 
could the careless soldier know of Socrates? 

But when we speak of knowledge of God, 
knowledge of that pure and uncreated Person, 
how shall the unholy know the Holy One, or 
the worldly know that which is spiritual, or the 
self-centered know him who is Love? Such is 
the drift of Illingworth’s thought. 

Knowledge of God, conviction that God is, 
sympathetic and interpretative affinity with 
him—these things are not the achievement of 
a day, but they ripen as a process. Neither 
are they to be won without attention to one’s 


36 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


own character. Reverence, the will to believe, 
hope, patience, all are necessary, and so is 
action. 

Action—this is the note that may well close 
this discussion. It is the note struck by that 
rugged doubter, Carlyle, in his chapter, “The 
Everlasting Yea.’ It is not surprising that in 
that chapter wherein he insists that Conduct 
is the prelude to Conviction, wherein he says, 
“Doubt of any sort cannot be removed except 
by action,” and writes in italics, “Do the duty 
that lies nearest thee’; it is not surprising that 
in that chapter he is able to turn with scorn 
upon the skepticisms of Voltaire and cry: “Is 
the God present, felt in my own heart, a thing 
which Herr von Voltaire will dispute out of 
me; or dispute into me? ... Feel it in thy 
heart, and then say whether it is of God! This 
is Belief; all else is opinion—for which latter, 
whoso will, let him worry and be worried.” 

But such magnificent belief comes on the 
wide moors of Action, not in the artificially lit 
and heated cloisters of Thought, where Faith 
withers for lack of exercise. Think, in the 
name of Heaven, but walk as you think! 


PRAYER 
I 


NEHEMIAH was too serious a man for us to 
suspect him of covert mockery, and yet in the 
account of his rebuilding of the Holy City, 
when he was beset by enemies bent on undoing 
his work, he gives utterance to these significant 
words: ““We made our prayer unto our God, 
and set a watch.” He asks God for help and 
then proceeds carefully to lay his own very 
practical plans to help himself, posting sen- 
tinels upon the walls. 

Unfortunately, some of us find it only too 
easy, in these days in which so many things 
are superficially different from his, to listen to 
his account of what he did with such a smile 
as is provoked by a spectacle of incredible 
naiveté, or else with that understanding 
sareasm which thinks it detects in him the 
same attitude, tired, cynical, knowing, that 
talks religion with its tongue in its cheek. “‘We 
made our prayer—appearances demand it, 
don’t you know? It is the custom and, who 
knows?—there might just chance to be some 


benefit we do not pretend to suspect. But 
37 


38 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


there is one thing we can trust—our own right 
arm; we'll set a watch. ‘God helps those 
who—help themselves!’ ” 

And yet you will not say that it is either 
Bible teaching or common sense that God will 
help those who refuse to help themselves. 
“Give us this day our daily bread,” is our 
prayer; but “if any would not work, neither 
should he eat,’ we are warned. Nehemiah is 
neither a simpleton, unable to see that his trust 
is really in the “watch” and not in the “prayer,” 
nor a mocker, well aware of the value of the 
sentinels but indulging a tilt at an outgrown 
faith. He was simply one of those sane old 
Hebrews who had learned—a good deal more 
than some of his modern critics—the divine art 
of keeping his feet firmly planted upon the 
earth while his lungs inhaled the pure airs of 
heaven. With what puckered disdain would 
any one of them have surveyed the astonishing 
examples of crazeology we could offer, ranging 
all the way from a clod-like materialism that 
has no eyes to see the sky, up to filmy religiosity 
that floats so near to heaven it cannot come to 
earth! Nehemiah would find no difficulty in 
seeing that God’s help and self-help must be 
united to make prayer. Perhaps we shall be 
able to show that both are necessary and are 
not contradictory. 


PRAYER 39 
II 


I want to lift out of this incident two persons 
and to invite you to watch their relationship 
one with another as we make our inquiry con- 
cerning prayer. 

There is God; and there is Nehemiah. 

Personality is spirit, and here are two per- 
sonalities. All prayer is between persons. 
When the disputing mothers presented them- 
selves with request before Solomon, or when 
the people of the United States petition their 
President, on both sides of the supplication 
stand persons. One does not attempt to sup- 
plicate anything else. 

Consider, then, these two persons, Man and 
his Maker. Each inhabits a world of law. The 
spirit of Man, dwelling in his body, is the best 
analogy we have of the Eternal Spirit’s dwelling 
in the universe.! 

Both the body of a man and the universe of 
God are ordered by a regime of inexorable law, 
and this it is that constitutes one of the most 
grievous problems of prayer. We know exactly 
the conditions and limitations of a man’s body; 
any physiologist will prophesy what will hap- 
pen if you cut a nerve or touch the eye-ball; 
let a wound open the flesh, and nature will 


1See J. R. Illingworth, Divine Immanence, Chapter IIT. 


40 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


proceed to healing in a manner which can be 
predicted to exactitude, and which will be the 
same as in the case of a million million wounds 
suffered by our race. Everything has its own 
laws, and what can the spirit of man do to 
alter them? Can he defy gravitation, or the 
nature of fire, or the need for food, and sur- 
vive? The spirit is his personality, but so long 
as it is in the body, must it not submit to the 
body’s laws? It is the law for his lungs to 
breathe; can he alter it? He does not wish to 
blush when embarrassed, but it is the law for 
his blood to flow, hastening to the brain when 
it is shocked; can he change the law? Like- 
wise, God is immanent, truly, in his Universe, 
but you remember Omar’s depressing lines: 


“And that inverted Bowl we call the Sky, 
Whereunder crawling cooped we live and die, 
Lift not thy hands to It for help—for It 
Rolls impotently on as thou or I.” 


Even if God is able to affect the universe of 
law, is he likely to do so merely because we 
pray? Do you realize what it means to inter- 
rupt a universe? Somewhere in the paralyzing 
recesses of space there plunges at incredible 
speed, as I speak, a vast world of blinding 
incandescence. We call it Halley’s Comet, and 
who knows what adventures attend its pro- 


PRAYER 41 


longed career amidst the myriad, wheeling, 
flaming inhabitants of God’s bewildering uni- 
verse? And yet, however proudly this courser 
of the skies may shake its burning mane and 
strike bright stardust into a long trail from 
its fleeing hoofs, and seem untamable, resistless, 
in the glory of its going—yet, without faltering, 
unhastening, the strong hand of Law is upon 
the rein; the great comet is controlled, will turn 
upon the bit as a chariot turns in its course, 
and those of us who live in 1986 will sit like 
Romans in the Coliseum and watch it come 
again, and go. Will prayer alter that? 

Somewhere on the mountains the snows are 
melting, and on the plains flooded rivers are 
devastating the country. Let us pray that the 
snows shall cease to melt. “No,” says some- 
one, “‘that is not feasible; rather let us begin 
earlier and pray that the snows may not fall 
so thickly in the winter.” But that will mean 
a change of wind, a reduction of evaporation, 
a control of sun-spots, a control of the forces 
behind the sun-spots, and behind them— 
“God can do it.” But what sort of a God 
would he be to play with his universe like 
that? 

What are we to conclude? Not that God 
does not love, but that he is unable, having 
shut himself in? Is prayer, therefore, futile? 


42 CARDINALS OF FAITH 
Ii 


Take up our analogy of man being immanent 
in his body, and therefore inhabiting a world 
of law which he cannot change. ‘There is 
something more than immanence; it is tran- 
scendence. 

Human personality is not a slave in fetters. 
He inherits a system which he is able to direct 
to his own abounding benefit. 


“Man has harnessed the lightning to his will, 
And spanned the ocean’s breadth with bows of steel; 
He has made the universe his mill, 
And set the winds to work to drive his wheel.” 


That which is heavier than air should fall, but 
man sits upon it in the clouds. Though he is 
naturally a slow-moving animal, he has learned 
to outstrip the ostrich and the wild wind. 
Though his voice is feeble, he has made it to 
be heard across a continent; though his eyes 
are dull he has shown them how to see through 
solids. He pounds with heavier hammers than 
that of Thor; he carries vaster mountains than 
Atlas; the thunderbolts he hurls make play- 
things of the terrors of Jove. He outdoes the 
labors of Hercules, turning the rivers to nourish 
the desert, chasing the ocean and reclaiming 
the land, everywhere placing his strong hands 
upon the laws of nature to show he does not 


PRAYER 43 


cringe and simper, but stands up and _ uses 
them. Some laws he controls by using higher 
law; some unexpected results he gets by 
achieving new combinations, of which the 
variety seems endless. In the realm of his own 
body he never lifts a hand without overruling 
the law of gravitation. Thus it is with the 
personality of man. 

Passing again to the Master Personality, 
there is an ancient chain of questions which 
has always challenged answer: “He that 
planted the ear shall he not hear? He that 
formed the eye, shall he not see? He that 
teacheth man knowledge, shall not he know?” 
Shall we not add: He that giveth man control, 
shall not he govern? 

By every wonder of the twentieth century 
we are able to proclaim: Personality is first 
and greatest. God is transcendent, personality 
always is. When God and man meet, and man 
is suppliant, rearrangements of a universe are 
not necessary in order to answer his need. 
Even we, though so dim in knowledge of the 
Almighty’s ways, can conceive of methods 
whereby he might work. God is Lord in his 
own universe, and is able to answer according 
to his will without derangement and dislocation 
of a single thing that helps to hold together 
the myriad worlds which he has made. 


Ad CARDINALS OF FAITH 
IV 


What then—a blank check? A moment’s 
reflection will correct such an idea. The 
relationship is not that of a man and a limitless 
but characterless treasury. Prayer is not an 
Aladdin’s lamp. The relationship, as we have 
repeatedly said,.is between Persons, and pro- 
found significance attaches here. Persons have 
character, and character must not be presumed 
upon. When Herodias supplicated Herod for 
John the Baptist’s head he ought to have 
repulsed her; and if God were to answer some 
of our prayers, he would be as immoral as 
Herod. When you pray, it is to the Holy One; 
you have no right to insult his character by 
petitions which, if answered, would cheapen 
the moral values of his universe. He is the 
Unwersal Father—by what right do you ask 
him to make a favorite of you? 

That is the significance of Jesus’ repetition 
of the need for praying “‘in my name.” Ap- 
proach in the spirit of Jesus, conceiving of God 
in his terms, and at once some prayers become 
impossible. It is easy for savages to ask wild 
things of their idols, but it is different with the 
God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ. He 
who is perfect Love, Wisdom, and Holiness is 
often more wisely to be intrusted with our 


PRAYER 45 


affairs than to be pressed overmuch by petitions 
that are born of lesser love, wisdom, and purity. 

This is first: no invasion of the integrity of 
God’s personality. This is second: no tnvasion 
of the ends of our own personality. The prayer 
which, if answered, would check our develop- 
ment is illegitimate. Paul “‘besought the Lord 
thrice’” and was denied; then it is the Chris- 
tian man begins to ask why? Paul began to 
realize that it was better for him to learn the 
grace of God than to be relieved of a thorn in 
the flesh. When cholera was raging in England 
Charles Kingsley was asked to pray for its 
arrest. He flatly refused. He believed that 
the responsibility for the cholera lay with man, 
not with God. “Do not pray for rain: lock 
your rivers!”’ said a distinguished archbishop in 
Australia, pointing attention to the millions of 
gallons of water being allowed annually to flow 
in flooded rivers to waste during the rainy season. 


V 

And yet there is virtue in such prayer if it 
is seen to be a means of learning wisdom. To 
pray is often to learn the incongruity of doing 
so and at the same time sitting still. Nehemiah 
prays for protection, and straightway sets a 
watch. “I knew my cruel brother’s traps 
would not hurt the little birds, because I asked 
God not to let them,” said the little girl. 


AG CARDINALS OF FAITH 


“Ts that all you did?” 

“No. I went out and kicked the traps over.” 

A hungry “‘tramp” knocks at the door of a 
country house, and prays for food. The house- 
wife eyes him estimatingly, for there are many 
scamps abroad with. pitiful stories but with 
hearts of loafers and rogues. How can she 
know if he is genuine? She offers him an ax 
and points to the woodpile; and if he is genuine, 
he will at once appreciate this way of earning 
his food honorably. If he is insincere, he will 
find an excuse and move on. But he accepts 
the suggestion, works at the woodpile, and at 
length returns with a self-respect that has not 
been sacrificed. 

But now, who is to be thanked, his own 
right arm or the housewife? It is plain that 
had he not prayed, he would not have had the 
wood suggested and he would still have been 
hungry. But also, had the housewife given him 
food too easily, granting he was in health, she 
would have gratified him at the expense of his 
personality. If God were to carry us through 
life in upholstery made out of cheaply answered 
prayers, we certainly might have an easy time, 
but at fearful expense. Not the dwellers along 
the equator, amid abounding vegetation and 
fruits, but the inhabitants of the stern north, 
wrestlers with the blizzard, are the men who 


PRAYER 47 


have made history. Nehemiah upon the walls 
is Nehemiah writing his prayer in deeds. You 
must not ask for what will diminish your own 
values or choke your own depths. 

All this engenders caution and discrimina- 
tion. Absence of it explains unanswered prayers. 
When, however, one can say, as Jesus did, “My 
Father worketh hitherto, and I work,’ a 
man’s purpose moving harmoniously with the 
Father’s, the efficacy of prayer begins to write 
itself out in the Journals of a John Wesley or 
the Life of a George Muller. 


VI 


But let me sing the song of this great com- 
panionship! Let me tell how it rejuvenates 
faith and courage, creates seers and prophets 
and moral giants. The man of prayer will see 
life more truly and will dare more nobly than 
another. It is this which is most fertile in the 
production of ideas; the mind which learns to 
react with the Infinite Mind can never stagnate. 
When the tide ebbs the seashore is sometimes 
marked by chains of pools which would soon 
foul if left thus isolated and undisturbed. The 
returning tide pours change and disturbance 
into them, and they are saved. Alas for the 
man from whose mental shores the Ocean 


48 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Mind has long ebbed! who has allowed sand 
bars of materialism to grow between himself 
and God! But great is he who knows seasons 
of divine inflow and disturbance—yes, dts- 
turbance! Such throb in man of the Infinite 
Life, such discontenting surge in him the 
powers of the world to come, have more than 
once proved the inaugural birth pangs of a 
new epoch. 

But do we begin to speak the benefits of 
prayer? As well try to tell the values of going 
from the city to the mountains with their 
health, their wide prospect, their redemptive 
rest. 


JESUS 
I 


*““Anp lifting up their eyes they saw no one 
save Jesus only.” That is what Matthew has 
to say of the disciples in that strange experience 
when Jesus “‘was transfigured before them.” 

What, then, has become of Moses and Elijah, 
who but a moment since were seen in friendly 
converse with Jesus? They have merely ap- 
peared in the picture that they might fade 
from it, leaving him to fill it all. And what 
has become of this talk of tabernacles for Jesus 
and the others? It has simply stopped, because 
it somehow did not suit then any more than 
now: Jesus cannot be put on a level with any, 
even of the world’s greatest. A mysterious 
voice always singles him out: “Hear Him.” 
Others were heaven appointed in their day, but 
once you have heard the voice of Jesus other 
voices, even of Moses and Elijah, lose their 
authority. No longer are there many masters, 
but One. At first we say, “I will bend the 
knee to Him as to the greatest teachers of our 
race.” Later we find we have somehow fallen 


prostrate upon our face, and we are not think- 
49 


50 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


ing of the company of the great ones in which 
He is worthy to stand, but we are thinking 
only of Him, in whose shining company no one 
is worthy to stand. The stars lightened our 
darkness until the sun arose. We lift up our 
eyes and see no one, save Jesus only, solitary, 
preeminent, peerless. 


II 


Thus it is when the soul stands upon its 
summits; the lower ranges of experience do not 
make so clear and emphatic this realization of 
the uncompanioned maturity of Jesus. Esti- 
mate of highest, divinest human loveliness is 
not aided by the crookedness and materialism 
of spirits at their lower ebb. Eyes coarsened by 
selfishness are not in condition to read and 
realize sublimity such as resides in the face of 
Jesus. But in the occasional hour of the soul’s 
best, when our feet stand upon the pmnacles, 
the preeminence of our Lord is realized. 

It is significant that the soul’s best moods 
should do such homage to Jesus; surely it is 
here that the soul may be trusted. This homage 
is independent of special theories about him, 
for men of widely different theology have 
united in it. Here is that rugged Scotchman, 
Carlyle, saying: “Our divinest Symbol . . . Jesus 


JESUS 51 


of Nazareth.... Higher has human thought 
not yet reached....A Symbol of quite peren- 
nial infinite character, whose significance will 
ever demand to be anew inquired into and 
anew made manifest.” “Thou wilt become to 
such a degree the corner stone of humanity,” 
cries Carlyle’s antithesis, Ernest Renan, “‘that 
to tear thy name from this world would be to 
shake it to its foundations. Between thee and 
God men will no longer distinguish.” Reading 
the Gospels in Saint Helena, Napoleon, in a 
passage that has become famous, exclaimed: 
“I am an understander, a reader of men. I 
tell you this Man was more than a man.” 
“Christ is surely the most sublime image 
offered to human imaginations,” Sir John R. 
Seeley assures us. No testimony to Jesus, 
however, is more beautiful than that of Theo- 
dore Parker: “‘The manliest of men, humane as 
a woman, pious and hopeful as a prayer, brave 
as man’s most daring thought, he has led the 
world in morals and religion for eighteen cen- 
turies because he was the manliest man in it; 
hence the most divine.” 

One could assemble almost indefinitely such 
testimonies to the supremacy of Jesus, gathered 
from the hearts of men who in their day repre- 
sented opposite schools of thought, and even 
opposing lines of action. And yet it must be 


52 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


admitted that the figure of Jesus does not 
thrust itself upon the vision with the arresting 
impact of that of a John the Baptist, or a 
Napoleon Bonaparte. When he is first seen, 
his very excellence tends to prevent sudden 
appreciation. Where there is oddity, there is 
attention arrested. The overweening strength 
of a Napoleon, or the righteous austerity of a 
John the Baptist, lack that balanced symmetry 
which always must be pondered to be realized. 
The deep stains of a sunset or the sheer abrupt- 
ness of a cliff catch the eye at once. But it is 
only as the mind lives with Jesus until he is 
known that there grows upon us a sense of his 
wondrous human completeness. He increas- 
ingly compels the thought: “Here is the 
harmony of our discords, the flower of our 
struggling roots, the completed circle of our 
baffled sections. This is humanity unblemished 
and mature, the goal to which our stumbling 
steps are summoned.” 


Hit 


Nowhere as in Jesus is humanity so trium- 
phant, serene, strong, gentle. We look in vain 
for another. Human thought has dreamed 
such things as he was, but who else has summed 
up in himself the world’s dreams as has our 
Lord? Gather our race’s best thoughts about 


JESUS 53 


God, most discerning and inspiring thoughts 
about men; bring your purest, noblest, 
tenderest codes of human duty, and they may 
all be shown vital in the flesh, in Jesus. 

There were things in him that were not 
apparent to Jewish eyes. As Emerson reminds 
us: “No man can learn what he has not prepara- 
tion for learning, however near to his eyes is 
the object. A chemist may tell his most 
precious secrets to a carpenter, and he shall 
never be the wiser—the secrets he would not 
utter to a chemist for an estate...”! So it 
was that the Jewish disciples missed much in 
Jesus, for while they were merely Jews, he was 
more than a Jew, being “the Son of man.” 
Therefore in the stories of him written by 
Jews such as Matthew we get all that wealth 
about him which lay open to the eyes of a Jew, 
and which could not have been so seen by 
another. But there was much in Jesus that 
Matthew never saw, and never reported. Pass 
into the fourth Gospel and feel the change. 
That Gospel abounds in ideas that were found 
in the philosophy of that day, the Logos being 
the most striking example, but here they are | 
attached to Jesus. How different this Jesus 
from that of Matthew! The church has always 
felt it, and used to account for it by saying 

1 “Spiritual Laws.” 


54 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


that the fourth Gospel described the divinity 
of our Lord, and the others the humanity. 
Others, often critics of the church and outside 
it, insisted that here was no picture of Jesus 
at all, but a philosophic amalgam that had no 
resemblance to Him of Nazareth. But why 
either? Nothing that is human was foreign to 
Jesus, and the truth found by the Greek is not 
likely to be lacking in him. May not the Greek 
mind gaze upon him and see things withheld 
from the Jew? It is testimony to the Master’s 
depth that the Greek mind did not come to 
him to be sent empty away. And we wait for 
the subtle Indian mind to discern still more, 
and the mind of the Mongol has yet to bring 
its key to open fresh treasure chambers in the 
mind of Christ. 

Still men see differently, and probably all 
they see is true, however poorly expressed it 
sometimes may be. What two men read 
Shakespeare alike? To one man Hamlet is a 
fool; to another a startling portraiture of him- 
self; so differently does experience prepare us 
to see or to be blind. We have our favorites in 
Shakespeare for the same reason. Personality, 
our own or another, never is capable of exhaus- 
tive delineation, and never is seen quite the 
same way by two different people. 


JESUS 55 
IV 


This reflection should have taken the sting 
out of the debates upon the personality of Jesus 
that have divided friends and families and 
churches in all the Christian centuries and 
which have gone so far toward hindering the 
triumph of his spirit among men. If the elusive- 
ness and mystery of personality are remembered 
better in our day, we shall not repeat the follies 
of our fathers. There are no doubt many left 
who will still insist upon definition and evalua- 
tion of our Lord, and who will cry out upon 
any who see in him something they do not, or 
who fail to share what they see, but there will 
be others, and wiser, who, while far from 
despising “the form of sound words,” will be 
more appreciative of the elusive nature of 
truth, which so readily “breaks through 
language and escapes.” These will love the 
highest when they see it, even if embarrassed 
to answer what precisely it is they love, and 
why. Machinery one may describe, but life is 
baffling. I have seen what purported to be 
photographs of thoughts, but always the effect 
upon me was to shock me with the smallness 
after all of what I had supposed to be so bril- 
liant and so wide-winged. Also I have long 
read careful definitions of the incomparable 


56 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Master, and I have been content if I have been 
allowed to say, “These are fragments, ap- 
proximations of the truth.” But when I have 
been told that these are exact, and that I must 
accept them as the truth which must not be 
altered or challenged, I begin to shudder as one 
who has listened to blasphemy! Who are these 
that with easy pencil fill up the picture of our 
Lord, as if he were some idol of wood that 
possessed no mystery they could not explore? 
And yet we have them with us. They will tell 
you with precision how far Jesus is divine, 
what constitutes the atonement, all about 
what happened to him at his death and 
after Our Lord is not allowed to be as interest- 
ing as the commonest man among us, who at 
least is too much of an enigma to be so con- 
fidently described. 

The mischievous and false dogmatism about 
him has alienated many from discipleship who 
could neither believe nor love the little, hard 
and unreal presentations thrust upon them in 
place of the living and magnetic Person. 

Frequently I am pressed to wonder how far 
such omniscient expounders of the mystery of 
Jesus realize that they themselves may be 
grasping a husk rather than the kernel, and 
how far they have really known him. The ages 
have been sick with the clash of creeds that 


JESUS 57 


have had more champions than the spirit and 
message of Jesus. He has been recognized as 
the glory of our race, but we have been far 
more concerned to analyze and assess the 
nature of his glory than to reflect it. How the 
Master has regarded it we have not considered, 
any more than did those soldiers who left him 
on his cross while they disputed over his 
garment. 


V 


When a man says to me, “I do not believe 
what you do about Jesus,’ I am bound to 
answer, ““And you never will.”’ Without strain- 
ing himself to see these things just as others 
see them, let him reassure himself that truth is 
quite able to conduct its own arguments. 
Therefore let him quietly give truth a chance. 
Let him teach himself to walk with Jesus, 
think his thoughts, share his judgments; let 
him get the heart-beat of him, his generosity, 
sagacity, tranquility, power, purity, and he, 
Jesus, will do for himself what I could never 
do. He himself will teach you—well, we shall 
not quarrel about phrases, but there will be 
abiding facts whether phrases are found for 
them or not. The inescapable logic of common 
experience will bid you say, “He is Mediator, 


58 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Reconciler, Saviour’; for, expla it as we may, 
it is contact with Jesus that pours more reno- 
vating and reclaiming streams through human 
personality than are to be derived from any- 
where else. 

Not any one of the disciples began their 
fealty to Jesus with ideas of him that have since 
become current in the Christian Church, nor 
with ideas of him that they themselves later 
arrived at. Any zealot who insists to some 
hesitating mind that he simply must accept 
all that the church has claimed for Jesus—all, 
or nothing, who makes the alternative as 
sharp and as extreme as that, does not do our 
Lord service, and wrongs the soul of one who 
might have been ready for discipleship. One 
who walks steadily with the Master will 
probably move far in his estimates of him ere 
he finishes, but for many men there will be 
no discipleship, no deepening loyalties, no 
awakened wonderings, if the only Jesus they 
are offered is a highly debatable thing of 
metaphysics. Some minds will never be con- 
vinced or captivated on authority, ecclesiastical 
or other. 

Not even to-day is it the elaborate Jesus of 
the creeds who conquers me! It is when I get 
back across the deserts of argument to cool 
Galilee and meet him there, real, warm, vital; 


JESUS 59 


it is there, where I am not greeted with the 
hard clash of theological machinery, but with 
life; where he asks me for no belief about him 
but the belief that he is my friend, and where 
he takes me among the quiet hills and talks 
with me—just talks with me about God and 
about myself; talks with me until my heart 
burns, and new dawns arise, and life becomes 
invested with strange dignity, and heaven 
draws wondrous near and fills the common 
day with mystic presences—it is there he 
conquers me. Then I stand up and gaze at 
him with trembling lips and ask: ‘“‘Who art 
thou? Who art thou? Art thou God? Art 
thou man? What art thou?’ And _ looking 
back with eyes that do not tremble he replies: 
“T am the Light of the world.” 

“Aye, Lord, indeed!” 

“TI am the Bread of Life.” 

“Aye, Lord, verily!” 

“He that hath seen me hath seen the 
Father.” 

“Aye, Lord, and never till then!’ 

“fT am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. 
I am the true Vine. I am the Resurrection 
and the Life.” 

And then, there in green Galilee, far away 
from the rasp of polemic and “‘the craft of 
tongue and pen,” he has put his hands upon 


60 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


my shoulders as a man who loves to talk with 
men, and he has searched my face in gentle, 
bantering mockery and has smiled and said: 
*‘And now, what am [?” 

And I have shaken my head and answered, 
“Nay, Lord; I shall never know what thou 
art until I know all that God and man is.” 

Then by the shoulders he has drawn me 
closer, that I might better read his face, and 
he has spoken more earnestly as if he would 
bring me to something that mattered more 
than questions of that sort: 

“Yes, yes; but in the meantime, what am 
Te" 

And I have understood the thing he really 
cared for, and with an emotion such as moves 
the soul that has found the Imeffable, the 
Lode-Star, the Consummation, I have fallen 
on my knees before him and cried: ““Thou art, 
thou art, forever and forever Lord and Master 
of my soul: for there is none else. Thou makest 
the stars pale and other masters dumb!” 

Then he has lifted my face and smiled again 
upon it and said: “So you do not wait until 
you have explained?” And what, when it 
came to decision, could I ever answer but such 
things as amounted on the whole to this: “Ah, 
my Lord, whither should my spirit turn, if it 
turn away from thee? Where among the 


JESUS 61 


children of men shall I find a beauty as in 
thee, thus to bind me hand and foot? Where 
else as here shall I find a magic voice to break 
profane infatuations, and thrill me upward to 
my best? Who else will open heaven to my 
soul and bring me to the Father? Oh, there 
is no other! To whom else should one go? 
Thou hast the words of eternal life!’ 

“‘Who should be king save Him who make 
us free?” But who makes us free as Jesus 
Christ, our Lord? 


JESUS 
(CONCLUDED) 
I 


Tue Lordship of Jesus does not wait upon 
metaphysical interpretations of his Person, 
and, theological opinions apart, he must ever 
be Master to all who are ready to surrender 
to the highest we know, for Jesus is that. 
Intellectual revolt from the dogma of the 
church does not absolve an honest man from 
loyalty to Jesus of Nazareth, whose concep- 
tion of life, of duty, of God, remains the best 
guide, revelation, nourishment in divine things 
that we possess. 

It must be felt, however, that the matter 
cannot be left here. The custom of Christians 
from the first is not so light a thing that it may 
be simply ignored, and that custom has been 
to pray to Jesus Christ, to believe he is an 
ever-living Presence, to ascribe to him the 
nature of God and to call him God. With 
perfect sincerity many to-day are finding such 
difficulty in following that custom that they 


frankly, some even militantly, decline to con- 
62 


JESUS 63 


form to it. To them it is a survival of that 
deification of heroes spoken of by Renan, 
altogether too naive to be credited by the 
philosophic mind. 

Yet there were philosophic minds in other 
ages than ours, and the great doctrines of 
Christendom certainly cannot be charged with 
being the plebeian offsprings of intellectual 
flabbiness. Modifications and developments in 
our statements of faith may indeed be forced 
as each new generation feels its obligation to 
speak in its own accent and according to its 
own light in order that faith’s reality may be 
preserved, but surely no changes are likely to 
come which will cause the thoughtful man to 
feel that the statements he discards are wholly 
foolish and entirely without significance or 
foundation. If Christendom has called Jesus 
“God” can it be altogether without reason? 
And if there is impatient reaction from that 
term in some quarters may it not be that, at 
least in certain cases, the reaction is the more 
violent because unaccompanied neither by fair 
endeavor to understand precisely what is meant 
by the term, nor by courageous reflection upon 
the problem of Christ’s Person. For there is 
undoubtedly such a problem; and if it is not 
to be solved by the mere claims of current 
Christology, neither is it to be escaped by a 

\ 


64 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


deprecating pout of the lips. Jesus Christ 
remains, demanding explanation and a category. 
Our very insistence upon the scientific temper 
of our age, upon the compulsions of reason, 
makes us to that extent less able to leave this 
unique Figure unassessed. “‘What think ye of 
Christ?” It is not depth but shallowness that 
lightly replies, ““A man like the rest of us!” 
and stops there. Scant respect, this, to the 
intellectual genius of those hosts whose thought 
has tarried provoked before this enigmatical 
Figure, and scant respect, also, to the spiritual 
instinct of still greater hosts who have fallen 
at Christ’s feet to ery, “My Lord and my 
God!” 


Il 


This lovable and impressive Jew of the first 
century had some arresting things to say 
about himself which cannot fairly be passed 
unexamined by any who would seek to get at 
who or what he was. One such saying starts 
into memory: “He that hath seen me hath 
seen the Father.’ But no sooner does one ask 
precisely what this means than a certain 
difficulty becomes apparent. “He that hath 
seen me—” but who ever saw Jesus, or who 
ever saw any man, for that matter, except as 
he shines through the veils that garb him, as 


JESUS 65 


light through a cloud that covers the sun 
from our direct seeing. Personality, being 
spiritual, is never seen face to face. Yet the 
light that filters through the cloud tells of 
greater glory from which it came, and there is 
similar testimony in the light that lies about 
Jesus. Men have loved to bask in his light 
even when they have not cared to ask its origin. 
The world has warmed itself in the Light that 
is Christ, and that Light has been pouring 
healing into our wounds and cleanness into our 
sewers and assurance onto our path; but not 
all who have lived by that Light have con- 
cerned themselves with questions of its source. 
Yet the richest and most vital feature of the 
message of Jesus will have been missed unless 
the meaning of him is faced—not of his teach- 
ings nor of his works (though these can never 
be separated from one) but of himself. 

It may be that we can more easily ask 
questions about Jesus than answer them. His 
Person, just who and what he himself is, is 
one of the most provoking problems of religion. 
If the intellect balks at the ascription to him 
of Deity, on the other hand, it does not rest 
satisfied in leaving him labeled as a man. 
He is that, but somehow the intellect grows 
restive under his confinement to this limita- 
tion, feeling that his unquestionable uniqueness 


66 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


has not thus been done justice to. Yet we have 
no vocabulary to meet his case. He is some- 
thing apart. ‘“‘We have no word,’ we might 
confess. “God we know and man we know, 
but who is this, suggesting both, yet precisely 
fitting our conceptions of neither?’’ Yet one 
cannot but feel that the problem, far from 
being neglected on account of its difficulty, 
must, rather, be persistently studied as the 
most ultimate and rewarding of all, for knowl- 
edge of Jesus Christ is knowledge of God and 
of man. 


Iit 


In certain quarters it has been customary in 
speaking of our Lord Jesus Christ to assist 
toward clear thought by making a discrimina- 
tion between “Jesus” and “Christ.” It is not 
necessary to push this discrimination too in- 
sistently, but for the purposes of our discussion 
it will be useful to observe it, applying the 
word “Jesus” to the normal human life of our 
Lord, and employing the term “Christ” to 
describe something else. 

There was a Jew, then, who lived in Palestine 
long ago. His name was Jesus. But that is 
passed. There was Something or Someone 
who lived in Jesus and who, as we believe, 
has never died. We are calling that Christ. 


JESUS 67 


Explain it as we may, Jesus brought God 
nearer to men than they had ever known him 
before, so that religion has become a new thing; 
and the hope of the world, the joy of life, the 
power of the Divine Presence, all have risen 
to new and unexampled measure since Jesus 
came. These are mere statements of fact, as 
one may state facts by declaring that the 
Northern Lights are playing and that he 
listened the other night by radio to a concert 
rendered a thousand miles away. Such state- 
ments of fact have their interest, but what is 
of even vaster significance to us is to know 
what is that mysterious world behind, of 
which these facts are merely the visible flower. 
To grow in knowledge of that is to grow in 
power; for then one, understanding somewhat 
the universe that God has made, learns to 
work in sympathy with it, until he can crush 
rocks to powder, spread his wings in the clouds, 
and make his voice with the speed of lightning 
to travel round the earth. It is not enough to 
acknowledge facts. They are small incidents 
compared with the vital world behind them 
and which they are publishing. 

It is a fact that the purity of Jesus was like 
mountain snow at sunrise, when the cold 
whiteness is beautiful with gold and warm 
with rose; it is a fact that his goodness was 


68 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


better than snow, which, after all, suggests 
only an absence of dirt, for not the absence of 
badness but the rich presence of virtue, mature 
and commanding, was the splendor of him; it 
is a fact that he lived with men as one whose 
joyous social instincts were urgent and im- 
perative, and that he walked with God as one 
whose spiritual- apprehensions were natural, 
effortless, and inevitable; it is a fact that 
when he speaks of men the heart of humanity 
thrills as a rich harpstring at the touch of its 
master; it is a fact that when he speaks of God 
men sit rapt and hushed and satisfied as if 
they watched the opening of new and diviner 
worlds. Facts they are—that no man ever 
lived as he lived, that no man ever spake 
as he spake; they are facts which all may test. 

But, after all, they are facts that are nearly 
two thousand years old, and, if that is all, 
then are they but little more related to me 
and not a very great deal more valuable than 
the wealth of old Lydia and the navies of 
Carthage. 

The imperishable value of Jesus Christ to 
us men, however, is not to be looked for in all 
that dazzling bloom of peerless words and 
character. The significance of the bloom lies 
in the inquiry it drives us to concerning the 
hidden stems and roots of it. The wealth of 


JESUS 69 


Lydia and the navies of Carthage are fallen 
and scattered like withered petals, but not so 
the forces of human mind and spirit on whose 
strong stems they once blossomed. Study 
these out-blossomings of the mind and spirit 
of man if you would understand a little better 
the folly, the ingenuity, the power of your kind. 
From generation to generation humanity still 
persists; it, at least, does not wither and pass. 
And continually is it throwing to the surface 
facts that tell about itself. The facts are of 
value because of their revelation of the vaster 
truth. 

Say not, therefore, that the facts about 
Jesus have no longer any relationtous. He was 
an efHorescence of Eternal Truth and Being, 
Being which men have struggled after always, 
and not without reward, but which was mani- 
fested fullest in him. The “effulgence’’ of God’s 
glory, the writer of the Epistle to the Hebrews 
describes him, “the very «mage of his substance.” 
“The image of the invisible God,” Paul says in 
similar figure. “No man hath seen God at any 
time, the only begotten Son, which is in the 
bosom of the Father, he’ writes the mystic 
writer of the fourth Gospel, “hath declared 
him.” 

Jesus is a revelation of God as a flower is a 
revelation of the plant that bears it. 


70 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


IV 


That Jesus is thus a revelation of God will 
probably present small difficulty to many, but 
the question which is urgent is larger than 
that. 

In claiming so vast a thing for Jesus we, 
perchance, will get further in commending our 
claim if we rely not so much upon recognized 
arguments which go to show that Jesus was 
more than a man. If it be at all possible to 
throw light upon just what we mean when we 
make vast claims for our Lord, the reasonable- 
ness thereof may do more toward strengthen- 
ing faith than any number of arguments that 
seem to maintain a position which, when all is 
said and done, seems to be inherently irra- 
tional. 

We have said that Jesus is an efflorescence 
of God. Now we raise the question: Is he, 
himself, God? In seeking to face it, let us ask 
this: Is the flower then a thing apart, and 
not itself the plant? No one contends that. Is 
Jesus Christ then a thing apart from God, or 
should we call him God? We need not tarry 
to point out that we do not call the man Jesus 
by that name, for the flesh perishes and God 
is Spirit. But what may we call that Someone 
who dwelt in Jesus as the explanation of his 


JESUS 71 


glory? The fourth Gospel, apprehending in our 
Lord Something that was without birth and 
without death, in the beginning with God, and 
itself God, gave it a name which we have 
translated “Word,” and said, ““The Word was 
made flesh and dwelt among us.” 

Very well, he used that word to describe a 
manifestation of God which he believed had 
been made in Jesus. Others, speaking of the 
same Truth, used different words, some speak- 
ing of the “Son,” others of the “Mystery,”’ 
while yet others called It “Christ.””. Were not 
all such words laboring to describe Something 
that is beyond us, Something without prece- 
dent, for which our vocabulary is inadequate 
and which we yet find to be inescapably real? 


V 


There was a quality in Jesus which the word 
“humanity” did not seem adequate to express, 
and it has been the custom of Christendom to 
describe it by the word “God.” Have we, 
after all, any other word quite so suitable? 
We may give it a more characteristic descrip- 
tion by calling It “Christ,” but, af by the word 
“Christ” is meant the Eternal Truth, that was 
before Jesus was born, that dwelt in Jesus and 
that persists now that the man Jesus 1s gone—tf 


72 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


this is Christ, then Christ 1s God. This it was 
in Jesus that unfolded itself, or himself, in 
divine flowers of word and work. The whole 
life of Jesus was a bloom of God. Mankind has 
plucked the fragrant bloom and called it ““God,”’ 
and mankind surely has done well—as well as 
one who takes a flower and says it is plant. 
Of course it is plant, of the very life and nature 
of plant; it is not animal, nor mineral, though 
something of mineral may be present to help 
make it shape itself. Yet assuredly it is plant, 

But in admitting this—and here is a feature 
of this subject which surely ought carefully to 
be indicated—let us not fail to see that it is 
not all of the plant. The flower has no roots, 
no leaves, no stems—has not a plant all these? 
Yet the flower is plant and without it no plant 
would be perfect. A mistake is made when one 
separates flower from stem and seeks to de- 
scribe each separately as if they were not one 
—as Jesus said of himself, “I and the Father 
are one.’ Another mistake is made when one 
is so zealous to give the flower its true name 
and to call it plant that the flower is hailed as 
complete, self-sufficient, possessing all the roots 
and branches of plant life. Though it is indeed 
truly plant, it has not all the functions of a 
plant, any more than Christ, who is God, when 
he dwelt in Jesus, can be fairly described as 


JESUS 73 


complete, and _ self-sufficient God. “Verily, 
verily, I say unto you,” said our Master, “The 
Son can do nothing of himself.”” But God, who 
is the Absolute, Self-existent, Independent, can 
do all things of himself. And our Lord Jesus 
Christ, in the days of his flesh, while of the 
same nature as God, must not be described as 
the Absolute, the Self-dependent, for he is not 
God in that sense. These are qualities of Deity 
which were not manifested in Jesus, in whom 
God, for our sakes, “became poor.”’ 

Howbeit, if any man puzzled in his questions 
to find a category for Jesus Christ should pro- 
test that the limitations of a flower make it 
inaccurate for one to call it plant, and if he 
prefers to give it another name, rather than 
sacrifice this Flower’s ministry to him by 
making him turn from it with impatience 
through a mere warfare of phrases, would it 
not be fair of an adviser to say: “Give it what 
name you will, but study it as a revelation of 
the Plant upon which it grows and from which 
it draws the life that makes its beauty. Through 
the Flower, be it plant or not, you may learn 
the meaning of Plant-life, and be sure you 
come to know that at least; for, after all, the 
Plant is more than its Flower, though, as we 
believe, the Flower is of the same nature as 


the Plant’’? 


74 ' CARDINALS OF FAITH 


VI 


The question urging itself upon some minds 
will, of course, be that this does not make 
Jesus Christ different from any one of us, 
seeing that God has flowered in us all, and 
that, even if Christ be the fairest bloom, there 
yet remains in him nothing to justify the 
extreme laudation of the Christian Church. 

One feels no need to resist the contention 
that it makes Jesus the same as all of us, for 
if we are to confine ourselves to the words of 
Jesus in seeking an estimate of his person, we 
shall be impressed by his preference for the 
term “Son of man”’ as applied to himself. This 
is the description he chose and used continually, 
and it ought to convince us of his seeing unity 
between himself and us. When, however, this 
kinship is pushed so far as to mean that he was 
in no wise different from us, what better can we 
do than cease discussion and simply stand 
alongside Christ by way of measurement? 

Somehow there are vast differences, and yet 
those are the differences which create such a 
challenge to our explanation. One asks, “‘Are 
we then all Christs?” and, ‘““With such kinship, 
may we not all some day grow to his stature?”’ 
etc. In this connection it may be pertinent to 
quote President William Jewett Tucker, in his 


JESUS 15 


life in Himself: A Meditation on the Conscious- 
ness of Jesus Christ. 

**A perfect man, of the degree of the perfec- 
tion of Jesus Christ, reaching ‘unto the measure 
of the stature of the fullness of Christ,’ is to 
me more incomprehensible, more impossible, 
than the incarnate Son of God. I would deny 
no essential likeness of the human to the 
Divine; but even if we carry the likeness to the 
possibility of a divine humanity, we are not to 
overlook the fact that a difference in degree 
may amount to a difference in kind. I take a 
drop out of the ocean. The drop is like the 
ocean, but it is swayed by no tides, it bears no 
ships on its bosom, it does not unite continents. 
I take a grain of earth from a mountain. The 
grain is like the mountain, but I can dig no 
quarries out of its bowels, I can cut no forests 
on its slopes, I do not see it lifting its summits 
to the first light of the day. Man may be like 
God, but I locate Jesus, not in the drop and the 
grain, but in the ocean and the mountain.... 
I search among the sons of men of all time, 
and I look in vain for one who had the con- 
sciousness of ‘life in himself.’ ... No: any inter- 
pretation of the personal life of Jesus Christ 
which can satisfy my mind must allow it the 
substance and quality and fullness of the life 
of God. I grant the mystery of the incarna- 


76 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


tion, but I prefer mystery to insufficiency in 
my faith. As I watch the process by which 
men are made to become sons of God, as I 
follow the stream of human redemption im its 
ceaseless and widening course, I can trace it 
to no other or nearer source than the Eternal 
Sonship of Jesus Christ.” 


Vil 


At the risk of repetition, let us make clear 
that what we declare concerning Jesus Christ 
is that he was a manifestation in time of a 
timeless Truth, a revelation in form and flesh 
of a spiritual Power and Person who has no 
form that we are able to conceive. It existed 
before Jesus came, but many things exist 
which we never knew until they housed them- 
selves in form. Electric energy shapes itself in 
the lightning and is revealed. We might never 
have known it otherwise. But our business 
has been to improve our knowledge and then 
to learn how to use this thrilling force. 

There was a moment in human affairs when 
the loving, seeking, saving, qualities of God 
focused themselves into human form as never 
before. Our eyes have been dazzled with that 
light! The burning flame that lit our spiritual 
skies has gone, but not the ageless, exhaustless 


JESUS v7 


qualities of God that caused it. We might 
never have known had Jesus not come, but 
now we know forever. You cannot picture 
God, but you can conceive him best when you 
look into the face of Jesus Christ. You can- 
not imagine what electricity is like, but you are 
left less ignorant after you have looked into 
the face of the lightning. When we speak of 
Christ our present Saviour, we are not thinking 
backward two thousand years, except to the 
extent that we want a likeness of an incompre- 
hensible truth. We mean by Christ those ever- 
present, ever-seeking, regenerating realities of 
God that are as a Shepherd, as Living Bread,.as 
a Door into a sheepfold, as Resurrection from the 
dead. There is in the Godhead what may right- 
ly be called a passion for men—a will to save. 

Mankind had had a glimpse of this before, 
but the manifestation glowed in Jesus as a 
beacon on a crag. He was the Saviour, and he 
is the Saviour, for nothing divine can die. 
His flesh is perished, but the eternal grace he 
focused in himself pursues its redemptions for- 
ever, but with vaster sweep. Therefore, as 
Paul says, “though we have known Christ 
after the flesh, yet now we know him so no 
more.” He hath ascended. He sitteth on the 
right hand of power. 


THE CROSS 
I 


How is it that the cross of Jesus has come 
to be so impressive a thing among men? Its 
shadow is upon all the New Testament; from 
spire and tower it overtops the towns and cities 
of Europe; it is Christ upon the cross that 
Dante finds himself unable to describe; it is 
the most affecting inspiration of art; and, in 
Christendom at least, it is the most sacred 
symbol of holy things. It has created a lit- 
erature and a hymnody, and from countless 
pulpits during nearly two thousand years it 
has been offered to the world as its glorious 
hope. What is the meaning of it all? Sym- 
pathy with the suffering of a good man? 
Then why not the ax that beheaded Saint Paul, 
or the faggot that burned Saint Mark, or the 
rope that hanged Saint Luke, or the spear that 
stabbed Saint Thomas? Or is there something 
deeper, some passionate significance more vitally 
related to the deepest needs of men? 

We are familiar with the long custom that 
associates with the cross of Jesus some achieve- 


ment on our behalf and some mysterious 
78 


THE CROSS 79 


mediation to us of redemption. Redemption 
and the cross have been ever bound together. 
How? and why? are questions that have been 
much disputed; language has been used that 
no longer convinces us, and which we some- 
times feel has been even injurious. Resentment 
on account of language that displeases us has 
often been allowed to obscure the deep signifi- 
cance which alone can account for the sus- 
tained interest in the subject. “God quenched 
the flaming sword of his anger in the blood of 
Christ” is an irritating enough declaration, but 
what shall we say of the man who is so in- 
censed by the words as not to see that the 
theologian who said it was wrestling with some 
fearfully vast idea? Manifestly, the death of 
Christ was to him the supreme enactment of 
time. The darkness seems never to have lifted 
from the hill called “‘Golgotha,” where ‘‘our 
dear Lord was crucified,” and the centuries, in 
trying to penetrate it, have felt that the death 
it covers is somehow different from all others. 

For great numbers Christ’s death remains 
thus significant, but there are others. To 
them Jesus and his death exhibit nothing be- 
yond the death of any good man foully 
murdered. When such an opinion rests upon 
many years of ripe study and experience of 
the subject it must be met with respect, but I 


80 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


submit that the intense fascination exerted by 
the cross of Jesus demands deeper explanation. 
One feels, as one has said of another matter, 
“as if he were being offered a box of matches 
in explanation of the flame of Jupiter, or a 
child’s box of colors to account for the tint of 
all the oceans!’ | 


II 


When Shakespeare was preparing to pre- 
sent the performances of King Henry of 
England in France he complained, with some- 
thing like disgust, at the narrowness of the 
stage upon which he was compelled to arrange 
his picture. “‘Can this cockpit hold the vasty 
fields of France?” he exclaimed; “or may we 
cram within this wooden O, the very casques 
that did affright the air at Agincourt?” He 
rather would have “a kingdom for a stage” 
but is, instead, compelled to call upon the 
imaginations of his audience to suppose that 
“within the girdle of these walls are now con- 
fined two mighty monarchies. Into a thousand 
parts divide one man,” he invites them, and 
so, by every means, to look upon this little 
stage and imagine the vaster. But as a matter 
of fact, if Shakespeare could have taken his 
audience to France itself, and shown them 


THE CROSS 81 


Henry’s campaign in undiminished action and 
splendor, he would have achieved little more 
than the bewildering of the people’s minds. 
His only way of bringing to them a conception 
of the truth was for him to lay hold of it with 
his own master mind, select the salient features, 
the chief characteristics, and by compressing 
them into narrow compass, present them to 
his audience in a measure that they could 
grasp. In other words, it was necessary for 
him to take the truth as it stood in its largeness 
and dramatize it into small but comprehensible 
measure, thereby not altering the truth but 
allowing it to be grasped. 

Have we not reason to think that in some 
such manner as this the infinite truth of God 
which, in its strength, would simply overwhelm 
the mind, has, from time to time, been 
*“dramatized’”’ in one way and another? And 
is it not just to claim that in the life and death 
of Jesus we behold, better than anywhere else, 
the “‘dramatizing’’ of his eternal and infinite 
reality? There is a striking passage in the 
book of Revelation: “‘And I beheld, and, lo, in 
the midst of the throne...stood a Lamb as 
it had been slain.” “In the midst of the throne,” 
in the very heart of the being of God, is some- 
thing of which the cross is our best symbol. 
Jesus in his life and in his death was the intel- 


82 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


ligible expression of something profoundly 
and permanently essential in the nature of 
God. 

“But so is any man a dramatizing of God.” 
Perfectly true—it is our glory! He who doubts 
it has not grasped the truth of the immanence 
of God. Every man is in some real sense an 
incarnation of God. Is this a dream? Then it 
is also a dream that God can ever mean much 
to us, for if you insist upon separating him 
from this intimate indwelling, you also separate 
us from knowing anything about him. An 
unrelated abstraction, without character or 
characteristic is the alternative, lacking the 
very perfections which we recognize to be most 
divine, which can only be by his relationships 
with his creatures. But if God is immanent as 
well as transcendent, I shall recognize and 
know him in the highest examples of human 
excellence. If God dwells and works in men, I 
shall see no great deed or virtue without feeling 
it right to say, “It is God’s efflorescence!” 

It is not without import that the ancients 
believed that the gods sometimes took human 
shape; we may yet come to see that God 
continually takes human shape. This is not to 
say that all that is human is God and that 
therefore we are God. But it is to say that 
God, who is infinitely greater than man, yet 


THE CROSS 83 


actually dwells in us, and more and more as we 
show him hospitality. 

Two factors require notice here: (1) God 
must always be greater than he can ever show 
himself through man, because man’s capacity 
as a medium is limited. For example, when we 
ascribe omnipotence, eternity, to God, and 
speak of him as “the Absolute,” we are stating 
ideas about him that seem intellectually neces- 
sary rather than reporting the revelation of 
himself he is able to make through man— 
unless, of course, the “‘necessary idea’’ is itself 
the result of a subconscious awareness of the 
nature of God, arising from his indwelling. 
(2) As a palace provides better entertainment 
for a king than does a hut, so a man of genius 
enables a larger and more various manifesta- 
tion of God than a common man—always 
assuming in each case the desire to entertain 
him; for the Great King will cross no in- 
hospitable threshold, and join no company out 
of sympathy with himself—no, not though it 
be housed in the genius of a Voltaire! 

So there are gradations in God’s self-revela- 
tion; there must always be, so long as men 
vary. Yet in every good life one may see God 
manifest in the flesh. In seeing the Great 
Incarnation let us not be blind to the lesser, 
for they make more reasonable and intelligible 


84 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


the greater. Everest would be an incredibility 
if all else of the earth were a plain. Handel 
would be meaningless to us, if in him alone 
dwelt the spirit of music. Christ could be no 
Master and Teacher of men if men were not 
themselves tabernacles of the Eternal Spirit, 
until spirit answers to spirit, truth to truth, 
and God to God. As an incarnation of God 
Jesus is supreme—but not alone. Though God 
may be said to be diminutively “‘dramatized”’ 
in every spiritually healthy life, it is a simple 
matter of fact that we see God “‘in the face of 
Jesus Christ’? as we see him nowhere else. 
God is God always, whether found in us or in 
Jesus; as light is light wherever we find it. 
Thank God for the stars that illumine our 
darkness, the great ones of the earth in whom 
God has in all ages shone with that “true light 
which lighteth every man coming into the 
world.” Yet the brightest star that ever shone 
pales before the rising of that golden sun of 
truth which we call Jesus! If you would study 
the nature of light will you gain aught by 
ignoring the sun? On the other hand, does the 
glory of the sun demand that you deny the 
stars? 
Il 

Holding fast, then, this truth of God’s 

radiant immanence in Christ, the incarnation, 


THE CROSS 85 


let us pass again to that other peak of Chris- 
tianity, the cross. 

In Gospels and Epistles the writers seem 
unable to escape the fascination of the cross 
and a sense of its central importance. The 
first Christians never contemplated it without 
emotion. The religious experience of countless 
believers through the centuries has combined 
to indorse this importance and share this 
emotion. Always able to see that it was 
innocence and love that suffered, and that the 
suffering was both from the malignance and 
for the sake of the ungodly, the wondering 
heart has ever filled before this vision of vicari- 
ous love. It was “for our sakes” that “he be- 
came poor,’ and he died—‘“‘the just for the 
unjust, that he might bring us to God.” Sin 
wreaked its spite on him. Verily he sustained 
in himself “the iniquity of us all.”’ 

Yet not as one who could do naught else. 
Less devotion to the cause of men would have 
escaped the cross. Compromise with the 
vicious spirit that was assailing him, which was 
the Arch-Schismatic, seeing it separated man 
from his Maker, and which was the spirit he 
had come to change—less loyalty to the only 
truth that could set men free and bring them 
to the Father—would have eluded the cross. 
Believers, standing in the shadow of “a lonely 


86 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


hill,” have continued to be subdued by the 
love that could thus die. “For,” as we ever 
say, “the love of Christ constraineth us; be- 
cause we thus judge, that one died for all, 
therefore all died; and he died for all, that 
they which live should no longer live unto 
themselves, but unto him who for their sakes 
died and rose again.” 

Many, however, have died for men in just 
that way, and the spectacle is always moving. 
In all ages the sublime self-offering of martyrs 
to truth, suffering on account of the sins of 
men, has defended by blood the higher way 
and purchased men to it. The connection of 
“‘our lesser Calvaries’” with the “green hill far 
away” was felt by Doctor Harris when out of 
the red heart of war he looked upon youth 
dying to save, and wrote his “Supreme Sacri- 
fice.” 


“Long years ago, as earth lay dark and siill, 
Rose a loud ery upon a lonely hill, 
While in the frailty of our human clay, 
Christ, our Redeemer, passed the selfsame way.”’, 


Not robbing Calvary of aught of its mean- 
ing, “our lesser Calvaries’” instead lift up 
divinely kindled torches about Christ’s cross, 
revealing the awful divinity there. It is the 
unique significance of Christ’s person that 


THE CROSS 87 


gives all that he does a meaning beyond any 
comparison. We tell with thrilling pulses the 
story of Livingstone, of Huss, of Savonarola, 
and of the redemptions wrought through them, 
but when we come to one “place of a skull” 
it is to gaze, and falter, and halt for phrase, 
until we cry with Dante 


“Christ 


Beam’d on that cross; and pattern fails me now!” 


Somehow, there we feel the presence of primal 
things of God. They are always felt when we 
are with Jesus Christ. Christ on the cross 
disturbs us with a species of terror and also 
with strange joy—terror at the sin of man 
that could work its outrage here, on him, and 
joy at the love of God that is greater than 
man’s sin. Presences move in the background 
of that cross. 

Out of full hearts the apostles poured their 
story, straining language to tell what they 
could not clearly see, employing such meta- 
phors as their times and training made natural 
—metaphors not so natural to us. Our attempts 
to strain their metaphors into definitions, and 
to find cold disquisitions on theology amid 
exuberant outpourings of hearts struggling to 
tell the redemptions of God as revealed in 
Christ, have led us to much unreal and im- 


88 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


possible, if not mischievous, dogma concerning 
the death of our Lord. We are beginning to 
see that the great Latin mind, with its mania 
for precision, its genius for law rather than for ~ 
literature and art, has tricked us much, filching 
from us more than we can spare of the coloring 
and content of scriptural imagery. The meta- 
phors about Christ cannot all be taken literally 
even by the most partial literalist. As has been 
well pointed out concerning these figures, 
“taken literally, they are mutually contradic- 
tory. Christ cannot be at the same time 
Ransom and Redeemer, Priest and Sacrifice, 
Propitiation and Advocate.”! One has but to 
ponder the pictures lying at the back of each 
of these words to realize this. No doubt there 
will be many who feel themselves unable to 
breathe much longer the hard atmosphere of 
Roman law courts and of the forensic theology 
born there, and these may be in danger of 
renouncing, with that metallic shell, the truth 
bound up in it. Even these will feel, however, 
that Christian experience answers easily and 
naturally to the great passages about the 
vicarious nature of Christ’s death, when those 
passages are freed from forced interpretations. 
God was incarnate in Christ, and the In- 


' Christ and the Eternal Order, John Wright Buckham, 
p- 136. 


THE CROSS LAS 


carnate bore the sin of man as truly as love is 
ever bound to bear the sin of the loved, tasting 
the cruel spear of it even in the heart. He 
“bare our sins in his own body on the tree, 
that we, being dead to sin, should live unto 
righteousness.” “Christ is High Priest, and 
Mediator, and sacrifice, and veil, and altar, 
not because he is any one of these, or even 
closely analagous to any one of them, but 
because he has plainly superseded them all’’?— 
this is the thought of the Epistle to the He- 
brews; in his life and death he woos us, he 
shows us the Way, “no man cometh unto the 
Father but by” him, and through him we 
receive “the reconciliation.” In its entirety, 
this is experience. 


IV 


We spoke of presences in the background of 
the cross—a background that is infinite be- 
cause of the incarnation. Earlier we suggested 
that the cross was a “dramatizing”? into com- 
prehensible measure of deep things of God. 

Observe that there is nothing new in Christ’s 
death, however; only a vivid culmination of 
all that went before. In the temptation, the 
self-forgetfulness at the well, the compassion 


2 How Christ Saves Us, Rev. James M. Wilson, D.D., p. 42. 


90 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


for the multitude, the tears for others’ grief, 
the menial washing of the feet, the same spirit 
of self-refusal and self-expenditure for the good 
of men is continually expressed. The cross 
expresses it, too, but as a burning climax. The 
sublimity of love and service that shone 
through all his deeds and words as a soft and 
lambent light here is gathered into a passionate 
and awakening focus. The cross becomes the 
most effective symbol of our Lord, of his 
character and message, telling of unselfishness, 
love, service, purity, persuasion, pouring them- 
selves out in a redemptive enterprise on a 
scale never seen before—or since. 

But what then? These things are God in 
man, these redemptive things. “God was in 
Christ reconciling the world unto himself.”’ If 
the cross symbolizes them, it symbolizes an 
eternal truth, eternal because it is of the very 
nature of God. Gaze upon the cross and be- 
hold the central moral principle of Deity! 
That which we call “the Passion” happened 
not merely once in history; it is always happen- 
ing. The Lamb was slain “before the founda- 
tion of the world.” God is always the Good 
Shepherd, the Tireless Seeker, the Redeemer, 
the Lover. Calvary was an outward and visible 
exhibition of an eternal truth; Calvary is past, 
but the truth it showed continues. We might 


THE CROSS 91 


never have known these things except through 
Jesus, for until one is shown the truth one may 
live in its company and not see it. But since 
Jesus revealed it, thousands have seen it 
testified to in themselves also. Francis Thomp- 
son is pursued by a Presence he cannot shake 
off; George Matheson surrenders to the “Love 
that wilt not let me go.”... The eternal pas- 
sion is lifted from its cold isolation and becomes 
an objective, intense, subduing and redeeming 
reality in the ever-present life of God. 


Vv 


May not one go further and speak of the 
stricken anguish of Calvary bearing witness to 
something abiding in God’s all-pitying heart? 
Indeed, can one avoid so doing? The sin of 
man frustrates him, deprives him. Redemptive 
energies are never separate from cost. <A 
mother expends herself for her erring child far 
more than her child ever dreams. Who can 
reckon the toll placed upon the spirit by such 
emotions as sympathy, solicitude, entreaty? It 
is pouring out one’s life to save! What does 
the New Testament mean by saying men 
“crucify the Son of God afresh and put him 
to an open shame,” and that they “trample 
underfoot the Son of God and count the blood 


92 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


of the covenant an unholy thing and do despite 
to the Spirit of grace’? It is all in the present 
tense! The redeeming solicitude of God our 
Saviour may still be “trampled on” and “put 
to open shame” by man. 

No more does God in Christ walk and work 
in Galilee, teaching and restoring and comfort- 
ing; no more do the wild lilies see him come, 
nor the “silver harvest of the sea’’ prompt his 
thrilling challenge to his own: “‘Follow me, and 
I will make you fishers of men.”’ Yet the per- 
fect story goes on: as long as God dwells with 
men the ministry of Jesus is a temporary picture 
of a permanent truth. Still God is teaching, 
calling, comforting, pardoning, reclaiming. 

No more does God in Christ stand in the 
judgment hall of Pilate, but ever and ever 
does he take his place in the hall of the soul’s 
judiciary, fictitiously indicted, gloriously ex- 
onerated, Conscience saying, “I find no fault 
in him,” yet miserably delivering him to be 
crucified in answer to the howling demands of 
the baser self. And ever God bears his cross 
and suffers on it as evil men temporarily 
triumph and darkness settles upon their world; 
but invariably in wondrous, resurrected power, 
God comes back to resume his ministry and to 
endure rebuffs, but by all means, as he is able, 
to save men from themselves. 


THE CROSS 93 


And he will follow, follow, he will follow 
until that hour come when the baubles that 
infatuate to-day have lost their gilt, the false 
sweets have turned insipid, and the tired, 
jaded soul pauses disillusioned in the charred 
midst of its bitter, fruited selfishness. In that 
hour his following feet will pause beside us, 
and if not to-day, if not to-day, before the 
wreckage come, perhaps then we will give our- 
selves to the only arms that can shelter, to 
the only heart that can see us as we are and 
yet love us, to the only strong life that can 
truly feed, repair, redeem the poor futile 
things we are, giving us such inspiration as 
sets the feet aspiring up the mountains of God, 
on whose high crests rest the calm, bright stars, 
that he alone may reach who learns through 
God to climb. 

“Unto him that loveth us, and loosed us 
from our sins by his blood; and he made us 
to be a kingdom, to be priests unto his God 
and Father; to him be the glory and the 
dominion for ever and ever. Amen.” 


SALVATION 
I 


ONE is never.quite sure whether to appreciate 
the note of urgency or to be shocked at the 
parochial imagination that lies in the question 
pressed by some ardent religionists: “Are you 
saved?” “Alas, if I am not!” one might 
answer. But there would be equal reason why 
one should say: “Alas, if I am!—for then 
how small a thing is salvation!’ If one should 
say both, the replies would not be contradictory 
so much as complementary. There is a sense 
in which we are saved in Christ now; there is 
a sense in which we are not saved in a thousand 
years. When a man passes beyond hearsay 
and tradition and makes his acceptance of 
Christ intelligently personal, in that hour he 
has surrendered a self-principle that makes for 
increasing death, and he has embraced instead 
the Christ principle or spirit, which makes for 
increasing life. 

It may seem a trifling thing to see a man 
who has been facing west swing round upon his 
heel and face east. He stands in the same 


place: what has altered? Yet this is the 
94 


SALVATION 95 


difference, that whereas once he faced toward 
the approaching night, now he looks toward 
the awakening day. Is there no material 
difference between night and day? If a man 
walks west, will it make no difference from 
the result had he walked east? If a man walks 
with self, will it be much the same in the long 
run as if he had walked with Christ? Is there 
nothing to fear? Are there no terrible dis- 
integrations possible—things whatever they 
be, for which our fathers used the names which 
we have surely not outgrown: sin, death? No 
west, no east; no death, no salvation. But 
there zs salvation, and a man is saved in the 
hour when he adopts in Christ the spirit that 
makes for day and life. Many are unable to 
record that hour, but the important matter is 
their conscious loyalty to the spirit of Christ. 
In that spirit a man is as one who faces east, 
and he is saved. Yet salvation has only begun, 
and but a little consideration is necessary to 
show in what sense the man is by no means 
saved. 


II 


The solidarity of the race, while furnishing 
us with “the moral momentum of a good 
ancestry,’ also accounts for many fearful 


96 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


problems in us—‘“‘sins of will, defects of doubt, 
and taints of blood.” Heredity works both 
ways. Spiritual and moral paralysis, bias, mal- 
sightedness, remind us of deleterious forces 
that were at work ere we were born, the effects 
of which are painfully with us, causing large 
areas that must be reclaimed before we can 
be said to be saved. The wide ambitions of 
God’s salvation are not to be completed in a 
day. Every new entrance of the divine life, 
through Christ enhances progress in the long 
reclamation. “I see a different law in my 
members, warring against the law of my 
mind,” cries Paul, expressing a consciousness 
of controversy between better and worse 
which every earnest man has known. A man 
may look upon every good thing in him and 
say, “There am I saved, by the grace of God!” 
Upon every blemished and unhealthy thing in 
him he may look and say, if he is earnestly, 
cheerfully trusting God through Christ, “‘There 
am I being saved, and my salvation is nearer 
than when I first believed!’ : 
One of the speculations of science has been 
concerning the manner of life’s first appearance 
upon this planet. Science gives a picture of 
the earth lying scarred and barren after ages 
of upheaval. But, somehow, life came, and it 
gradually reclaimed the earth from its un- 


SALVATION 97 


seemly dearth, spreading wide the forests and 
the grasses and the flowers, and peopling it 
with birds and beasts. But how did life come? 
Lord Kelvin once suggested that a world on 
which was life may have collided in space and 
that later a fragment—‘“‘the moss grown ruins 
of another world,”’—like a meteor fell here. It 
is a fanciful conception, but it is useful to us 
in this study. The world was dead. Somehow, 
sometime, life entered. In that moment the 
world was saved: however insignificant the 
germ, no longer was this world lifeless. Yet 
how much of plain and hill and valley must 
that life conquer ere the earth could be termed 
saved indeed? This is how men are saved and 
not saved. That man is not lifeless who carries 
so much as a spark of grace in his heart; yet 
is a man not saved though through years the 
grace,of God has been spreading and conquer- 
ing within him. 

Or consider it in this aspect. Certain large 
tracts of England had for many centuries been 
known as the fen country. That country was 
treacherous, noisome, useless, waterlogged, until 
some man dreamed of a change to happy 
homes, farms, flowers, and harvests. An 
audacious scheme of drainage was prepared. 
But why should the government accept that 
scheme? Even if drainage should succeed, the 


98 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


very soil was rotten. Yet in the hour when 
the project was accepted by the government 
the fens were reclaimed—and they were not 
reclaimed for years! What collecting of re- 
sources, installing of trench and barrier! What 
slow running away of water that had poisoned 
the land for generations unnumbered! But 
steadily here and there the land rose bare to 
the sky, and the energies of the sun began to 
cleanse the soil, pouring into it sweetness and 
health, and so, gradually, the fens were re- 
claimed. 

Christ dreamed a thrilling dream of human 
redemption, and he brings his proposals to 
each man. Man may raise incredulous objec- 
tions, but in that hour in which a man’s govern- 
ment accepts Christ and his plan of recovery 
the man is saved—yet not saved. The very 
soil requires sweetening in the sun, and though 
this end is assured from the beginning, by no 
means is it achieved from then. 


Til 


This plan of recovery, this “‘plan of redemp- 
tion,’—if one may dare use the phrase and yet 
hope to leave the mind virgin of the stiff and 
artificial ideas so often represented by it— 
what of it? That we are “saved by faith” is 


SALVATION 99 


too prominently written in Scripture, and in 
experience, not to be recalled to mind. “To 
him that worketh not,’ declared Paul in a 
characteristic sentence, “but believeth on him 
that justifieth the ungodly, his favth is counted 
for righteousness.” One can imagine the de- 
light a passage of this sort would have brought 
to the heart of a John Wesley, and one wonders 
if a Jonathan Edwards, or any of the older 
preachers, would have been other than at 
home with it. Those old warriors of the Un- 
dying Cause loved to get a text of Scripture 
that was full of meat, and then they would 
deal with it mightily, and leisurely, and if they 
did keep their congregations long at the gospel 
table, at least they sent them away well fed. 
The passage quoted is close-packed, and has 
an old-fashioned flavor about it that is very 
pleasant, and who knows whether it may not 
still be able to confer blessings of old-fashioned 
healing and peace. At least it is a window into 
the mind of Paul, whose guidance in matters 
of the soul’s salvation is not to be despised. 
Observe the word “‘ungodly,”’ once so central 
to the preaching of the pulpit giants of old. 
To them the fiercest problem of all, and the 
most fundamental, was the spiritual derange- 
ment of men, and I do not see that human 
nature has changed. With genuine insight 


100 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


into essentials those old renovators of their 
kind used to insist that it was of little use 
putting patches into rotten garments, or 
varnishing worm-eaten and decayed timbers. 
Character, they believed, needed deeper treat- 
ment than superficial makeshift if it were to 
be saved. They used to talk of a new birth, of 
a making of things all new. We have not 
changed, and still there are those who have 
not grasped the truth that underneath a hun- 
dred troubles the central problem is our own 
ungodly selves. The fault and the cure still 
lie far down in the heart. “The fear of the 
Lord is the beginning of wisdom’’; it is also 
the beginning of soundness at all the roots of 
one’s thinking and one’s behavior. 

With an insidiousness too refined to be 
readily traced, and with effects too far-reaching 
to be easily credible, a moral and _ religious 
malady known as “‘ungodliness” lies more or 
less at the hearts of all of us. Like all diseases, 
it is a thing of degrees, inflicting, in its milder 
stages, a general debility upon faith and hope, 
moral sensitiveness, and religious appetite, but 
in its advanced phases blighting the life itself. 
The trembling is not the palsy, but the sign 
of it; the fever is not the poison, but the sign 
of it; blindness, dumbness, deafness are often 
enough the outward marks of deeper physical 


SALVATION 101 


trouble, and blindness, deafness, in religion, 
unhappiness, moral paucity, are also, as a rule, 
to be explained by trouble that may not super- 
ficially appear. It was not a man’s drunkenness 
or profanity, his greed or his callousness, his 
worldliness or his impurity that concerned the 
older preachers, so much as the submerged and 
stubborn cause of all this. Therefore they 
preached to the ungodly, and they brought to 
men the sovereign cure when they preached 
the gospel as the cure of ungodliness. They 
would rejoice in a text such as_ this because, 
having been faithfully frank in not avoiding 
the unpleasant word, it joins to it the word of 
hope, and speaks of “him that justifieth the 
ungodly.” 


IV 


Justification means more than pardon. A 
criminal may be pardoned with no change 
having taken place in himself, but the gospel, 
in proclaiming pardon, proclaims in_ addition 
that God so works in the ungodly that the 
texture of the man’s character is changed, until 
he becomes just and honorable. 

But “Show can man be just with God?” asks 
Job, in despair at the immeasurable distance 
between himself, with all his righteousness, 
and the perfections of God. In the New 


102 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Testament Paul unfolds his gospel of “‘justifica- 
tion by faith,” claiming that a sinful man has 
been offered a way whereby he can stand 
before heaven as one who has been not merely 
forgiven, but as one in whom God is well 
pleased. In a moment we shall look at the way, 
but first it is very important to note that 
between mere pardon and justification there is 
such difference as lies between death and life. 
Unless in pardoning a man there is an accom- 
paniment of change for the better in himself 
you have done him little good. One who knows 
within himself that he is unworthy will find 
that in that dark knowledge lies what might 
be called (if the terms are not self-contradic- 
tory) a progressive devolution; that is, a 
movement to develop downward, to elaborate 
unwholesomely. “Give a dog a bad name and 
he'll live up to it,” or down to it, and most 
destructive of all is it when you have to give 
yourself a bad name. Let the conviction grow 
within you that you are an onlooker at virtue, 
not a participator, and so long as you have it 
you can do no other than grow your fruits 
from that seed. Live upon the clemency and 
mercy of the Judge, as one who, if he got his 
deserts, would be unable to stand, and the 
private knowledge of your continued unfitness 
will make for further disintegrations. But the 


SALVATION 103 


message of Paul is better than that. To pardon 
is added justzfication, whereby the pardoned 
sinner lives by mercy, indeed, but also by 
justice. He has stepped upon certain grounds 
which have altered his character at its root, 
and while the past is pardoned, the present is 
justified, honorable, self-respecting, not de- 
pending upon the clemency of the judge but 
knowing the judge has no fault to find. 

You will not forget William James’ defini- 
tion: “To be converted, to be regenerated, to 
receive grace, to experience religion... are so 
many phrases which denote the process, gradual 
or sudden, by which a self hitherto divided, 
and consciously wrong, inferior and unhappy, 
becomes unified and consciously right, superior 
and happy, in consequence of its firmer hold 
upon religious realities.” The word “con- 
sciously”’ is a potent word here. If a conscious- 
ness of being wrong becomes disastrously 
creative, a consciousness of being right has in 
it forces of creative evolution, tempting to all 
sublime climbing. If there is a way whereby 
we may achieve that, let us hear of it. 


V 
It is “not by works but by faith.” “To 


1 Varieties of Religious Experience, p. 189. 


104 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


him that worketh not, but believeth, ... his 
faith is reckoned for righteousness.’ Righteous- 
ness is not simply the absence of badness, but 
the positive presence of goodness—and a man’s 
faith in Jesus Christ is reckoned to him for 
that! How can this be? Because I say, “I 
believe,’ does God shut his eyes to facts, and 
treat me as if I were righteous when he knows 
very well I am not? That might exhibit mag- 
nanimity on the part of heaven, but not 
honesty. Well, then, does God practically say: 
‘You are a sinner, but ’m not concerned 
about that. I lay such paramount stress upon 
belief in Jesus that if you have that, Tl take 
it instead of the righteousness’? Some might 
think that that would do honor to Jesus, but 
few could see what real good it would do to 
men, whose blessedness lies in the enrichment 
of personal character, not in faith in Jesus, 
unless that faith brings us genuine personal 
righteousness, which it does not if it is only 
mental assent. Or perchance, Zinzendorf’s 
hymn states the solution: 


“Jesu, thy blood and righteousness 
My beauty are, my glorious dress; 
Midst flaming worlds, in these arrayed, 
‘With joy shall I lift up my head.” 


What precisely do these words mean? I have 


SALVATION 105 


heard them used as if, the moment we believe 
in Jesus, God sees us no more as we really are, 
but looks at us through the medium of our 
Lord, as one might look at a scene through a 
colored glass until all was tinted by it. Thus, 
whatever may be the truth about us, God, 
looking at us through the righteousness of 
Christ, sees us dressed in a glory not our own, 
and judges us on that. But I think God does 
not play tricks either with himself or with us; 
the plain fact is that no man can be made 
glorious with another’s righteousness. 

How, then, can a man’s faith in Christ “‘be 
reckoned for righteousness’? How can it be 
that such belief makes him a righteous man? 

It cannot be unless it be the faith which is 
a moral activity, drawing with it the assent 
and cooperation of the entire personality. 
Sentimentality is not faith. Faith in the Allied 
Cause during the Great War could not mean 
neutrality. Faith in Jesus involves acceptance 
of his view of the seriousness of sin, his view 
of your value, of life’s ethics, of God. It is 
not dependent upon a certain credulity of mind, 
nor is a mystical temperament necessary to it. 
The most practical, unemotional man can say 
of Christ’s view of sin and of God: “Hence- 
forth that is to be mine!” To be “in Christ” 
means to be in personal sympathy with and 


106 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


loyalty to him—which, of course, includes a 
similar attitude to his views. 

And it is this faith which is reckoned to a 
man for righteousness. Yet he knows he 
continues to be a man of many faults; his 
exercise of such faith may effect no sudden 
reformation of his manners conspicuous enough 
to cause all the world to ery: “Behold, the 
righteous man!” The judgment of the world is 
no very serious thing, after all, and God’s judg- 
ment is that the man is righteous. But why? 


VI 


Here we come to that great Pauline doctrine 
of “imputed righteousness.”” Again and again 
Paul comes back to recite a line from the Old 
Testament: “Abraham believed God, and it 
was accounted unto him for righteousness.” 
Abraham was as yet inexperienced and un- 
tried, how could he be credited with righteous- 
ness such as can be proved only in the testing 
years? A mysterious promise had grown in 
Abraham’s heart, a promise of great inheritance 
in another land than that of his fathers. Long 
and fierce hardships and peril might lie between 
him and his achievement, but the voice that 
spoke its promise and its call in his heart also 
offered strength. Then Abraham’s whole man- 


SALVATION 107 


hood stood up and said, “Yes!’ He believed 
God, he adopted as his that myriad destiny 
which was offering, and the conditions of it, 
and behold, all that heroism, endurance, 
loyalty yet to be displayed as he followed on 
was immediately “reckoned”? unto him. Was 
it right? Surely; for Abraham was already all 
that in embryo, and God judged him by his 
maturity. 

Thus is a man estimated when he makes 
Christ his own; and it is perfectly right. “A 
man 2s in the truest sense what he wishes to 
be.” God judges us by the object of our faith. 
In accepting Christ with his promise of vast 
inheritances and of sustaining grace, a man 
plants within himself the seeds of a thousand 
trees of righteousness. Give him time, the 
trees will come to fruit. The Standard Dic- 
tionary says an orchard is “a collection of trees 
cultivated for their fruit.”? Not the fruit, then? 
That in good time, but already an orchard, 
though very young. The entire “genius” of 
the trees is right, and the movement is toward 
fruit; it is an orchard. Our faith in Christ 
similarly enables God already to call us 
righteous, for there is wide difference in what 
is planted in the soil by faith in Christ and 
what is allowed to gather, weedlike, through 
indifference to him. 


108 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


A shipbuilder walks through his yards (to 
quote an illustration from Wade Robinson)? 
and gazes about him with satisfaction upon the 
unsightly nuclei of mighty ships. Through 
their gaping ribs the sky appears; scores of 
hammers rattle inharmoniously upon them; un- 
shaped, unpolished, they seem little enough 
able to inspire a poet or encourage hope in a 
merchant. The shipbuilder, however, looking 
upon them, beholds them already floating 
majestic amid summer isles or battling nobly 
with arctic storms, and in the light of that 
destiny their present stage of development and 
the work being done upon them is justified. 
There is no complaint. Because he sees the 
end, he sees that all is right. He reckons to 
them the perfections that are to be. “When 
God imputes to you the righteousness of Christ, 
and calls upon you to impute it to yourself, he 
only asks you to save yourself from the false- 
hood that you are not like Christ, and to rise 
into the truth that in the highest sense you are.” 

Therefore in Christ a man is not as a quarry 
slave who is relieved of his chains only by the 
clemency of his master: he is free-born, though 
only a babe. In Christ a man does not slink 
through life as a criminal who, if he got his 
deserts, would be overwhelmed with the divine 

2 The Philosophy of the Atonement, p. 61. 


SALVATION 109 


displeasure; in the august courts of divine 
justice he has not to say: “I am a sinner; I 
am undone; I fling myself upon the mercy of 
the court.” On the contrary, he is able to cry, 
*“My pardon I claim, for a sinner I am, a sinner 
believing in Jesus’ name.” And in those 
solemn courts the voice of the Great Judge 
answers: “He speaks well, for is it not written: 
“To him that worketh not, but believeth in him 
that justifieth the ungodly, his faith is counted 
for righteousness’ ?” 

“To him that worketh not...,” not by re- 
sisting darkness, but by yielding to light; not 
by frowning energetically against badness, but 
by smiling calmly toward goodness; not by 
life’s circumference trying to set its house in 
order by good works, but by life’s center chim- 
ing with the soul of all goodness by faith; not 
codes, which are static, but faith in Christ, 
which is indefinitely creative—this is man’s 
way to conquest, happiness and God. Not by 
bravely fighting Satan, but by accepting Christ. 
The “plan of salvation” is as psychologically 
sound as it is simple. 


SALVATION 
(CONCLUDED) 
I 


WE should not have failed to see in all this 
something of the satisfactory nature of our 
present salvation in Christ. Let us not mini- 
mize the importance of that or weaken our 
assurance of it. But just as we saw that salva- 
tion is a long reclamation impossible of rapid 
completion, so, from another angle, it is a 
process of growth into Christ, and one has 
only to realize the boundless prospects there 
for him to appreciate how true is the sense in 
which he may hesitate to say, “I am saved.” 
When a lady asked, “How may I find the 
Saviour?” it is conceivable she expected to be 
informed upon certain “steps to Jesus,” as if 
one should be able to take such steps and 
arrive. Verily, this finding of the Saviour is a 
trifing enough thing, it would seem! There 
are some who lightly speak of it and who, 
devoted no doubt but not always imaginative, 
are ever ready to present you with some per- 


fected method of discovery. Yet we must not 
110 


SALVATION 111 


shun the challenge of that question: “How 
may I find the Saviour?” . 

Observe that scene as Jesus and his disciples 
emerge from one of the many small villages of 
Cesarea Philippi. Behind them is yet another 
informing experience; before them opens the 
country; the last lingering straggler ceases to 
follow them and they settle down to the walk 
to the next village. The green fields slip quietly 
to the rear as they journey; one by one the 
hills draw near, pause a moment, and go. The 
Master is alone with his disciples. 

Have they found the Saviour? Why, yes, 
surely; they are his disciples; they have been 
with him now quite a while. But have they 
found him? Well, if they have not, who has? 
They have touched him, have left all to follow 
him. Yes, but have they found him yet? 
They have verily touched him, and have left 
all to follow him, and have listened to his 
wondrous words, and have beheld his mighty 
deeds; but in the midst of all what has Jesus 
meant to them? Are they, after all, very 
deeply different from those old days before he 
came? Have they indeed found him? 

And so, as they walked, he asked them: 
“Who do men say that I am?” And they told 
him. The vital question next arrived—it was 
personal: ““But who say ye that I am?’ One 


112 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


can almost see the Master’s quick glance imto 
their faces as he spoke, for who could say if 
he was now about to listen to a repetition of 
what they had heard? Had they accepted ideas 
from others, or had they come to some of their 
own? Was their estimate based on hearsay, or 
on experience? Was he now to be forced to listen 
dully to the old familiar but lifeless eulogy, 
great names truly, but said by rote: “Elijah, 
Jeremiah, one of the prophets’? Had they been 
long with him and yet had not known him? 

- At school I was made to study Milton, and 
he wearied me. Later, because men said he 
was one of the masters of our language, I felt 
my duty directing me to him once more, but 
though I opened his pages again and again it 
was to lay them down disappointed and un- 
captured. “Who do men say that I am?” 
Milton might have asked, and I could have 
answered him. “Who do you say?” and I 
should have been dumb, or else have recited 
the customary thing. But only a few years ago 
YT “found” him. I argued that reputations of 
his kind are not made by accident, and that I 
must know his secret. I shut the door, took him 
from the shelf and settled down to give him at 
least one hour undisturbed. Previously he had 
wearied me in five minutes. On this occasion, 
in less than fifteen minutes he had flung upon 





SALVATION 113 


me his sublime and awe-inspiring spell, and 
from it I have never escaped. What had 
forged the key to open that which hitherto had 
been locked? No doubt previous attempts had 
helped; and so had my enlarging experience of 
life and literature; but that arousal of myself 
to find his secret, that temporary abstraction 
that I might find him as a pearl of great price, 
was the final and essential need. Straightway, 
while Milton now appeared to me as he had 
appeared to no one else, I could see life and 
value in all the great descriptions of him that 
others had made. | 

It is by a similar way that some pass from 
hearsay to experience with Jesus. But on this 
occasion Jesus was wondering if that had yet 
taken place with his disciples. “‘But who do 
ye say that I am?” he asked. And it was 
Peter who broke into the famous personal con- 
fession of faith: “Thou art the Christ!’ Here 
was something living in Peter’s voice; no cheap 
recitation was here. Has he now, then, found 
the Saviour? If he finds Jesus Christ, he finds 
the Saviour, for these two are one, and to the 
extent he finds Jesus Christ he finds the Saviour, 
and no more. His words have just shown that 
the significance of Jesus has been growing 
upon him, and therefore we shall ask, ““Has he 
yet found the Saviour?” 


114 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Yes; in the hour when Peter saw for himself 
that Christ was Lord and Master—not of the 
world, but Ais Lord and Master—he found the 
Saviour. Do not judge him too harshly upon 
his words; he was only an ignorant man, and, 
after all, he used the words he felt to be most 
suitable, the words in current use about the 
Messiah. The words matter little enough. 
Many have found the Saviour while using 
radically different words or none at all. The 
essential thing was Peter’s arrival at the 
moment of intensely personal relations between 
Jesus and himself. To Peter, Jesus had be- 
come First, Best, King, Messiah, Saviour, All. 
He had found the Saviour. 

But what is meant—that he had suddenly 
discovered an emotion toward him? Not at all; 
emotion is aside. If he knew emotion, there 
was a perception that provoked it, and the 
perception was what mattered. Whenever any 
man personally sees the significance of Christ 
in such a manner as to say: “This One must 
henceforth be my Lawgiver and Companion,” 
he has found the Saviour. 


II 


But now, how can the Saviour thus be found? 
How can this be told when no two men are 
alike, and when every man must seek accord- 


SALVATION 115 


ing to his own way. Some grow to the Lord 
as the flowers to the light; others doubt, wan- 
der, return, finding their way through storms; 
so different are the manners of our finding. 

As general guidance let three things be said: 
(1) Place your mind where it will be sure of 
companionship with Jesus; that is to say, in 
the New Testament, in the House of Christian 
Worship, in the conversation or book where 
he dwells. Give your mind an opportunity to 
know him. (2) Watch against the perversion 
of judgment and vision by sin, for selfishness 
finds little knowledge of the Selfless One, the 
crooked cannot expect companionship with the 
straight, what communion hath darkness with 
light? The fuller the values you bring, the 
more will you possess the secret of learning the 
“unsearchable riches of Christ.” (3) Follow 
each step as you see it, not waiting until “the 
distant scene” is all unfolded. One need not 
say that this will provide certain theological 
opinions about Jesus, but that it will aid to- 
ward discovery of Jesus himself. 


Ii 


And yet there is danger here of talking as if 
personality were a sort of jewel, a piece of 
scintillating mineral, lying in a certain place 
and only to be looked for to be “found.” The 


116 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


stone is found, and that’s the end of it. But 
personality when found is only begun with: 
you go on forever finding. First there is dis- 
covery, and after that, exploration. Though 
Columbus discovered America, he never saw 
the great lakes, mighty rivers, mountain chains, 
rolling prairies of this New World. 

Can one presume to say, “I have found 
Christ”? Can one plunge into the ocean and 
grasp it with the hands and ery, “I have found 
the ocean’? Yes, he may; but as a lad paddling 
in an Australian bay I might have said some 
such thing, and it would not have been entirely 
untrue. The day came, however, when I was 
tossed in storms off the Cape of Good Hope; 
later I looked out upon the deeply sleeping, 
slowly heaving, tropic Atlantic, and watched 
the shining mirror of waters being broken only 
by the occasional leap of the bonito and the 
alarmed skimming of the flying-fish; then I 
observed the moods of the Arctic, where the 
icebergs grow; again I stood as upon a ship 
aflame, gazing at the great, red sun as it sank 
over Africa, boiling the Indian Ocean into gold 
and vermilion as it went; and, lastly, there was 
a day when I looked upon the noble Pacific, 
island studded, coral ridged, gorgeous with 
marine gardens through whose flowers and 
branches floated not birds or butterflies but 


SALVATION 117 


fish as lovely as either in radiant colors and 
delicate shapes. And now, tell me, would it 
have been true if, as a lad paddling in an 
Australian bay, I had said, never dreaming of 
all this, “I have found the ocean’? Yes, 
probably it would—as true as that the disciples 
had found Jesus during those first months 
with him. But that is not the sort of knowledge 
that can inspire a poem like Byron’s on “The 
Ocean”; and the only knowledge of Christ 
that is our ambition is that which gathers the 
familiar letters of life’s common alphabet and 
lifts them into a noble poem, infused with 
noble enthusiasm and singing with noble lyric. 
And in that sense the disciples had not yet 
found the Saviour. And in that sense many of 
his modern disciples who have long been 
familiar with his words and person have not 
found him. 

It was not long before Peter was shown 
that though he had found the Saviour he was, 
in fact, merely paddling in the shallows. 
Already Jesus is talking to him of the things 
that appertain to the Christ—the way of 
sacrifice and service, the endurance of resent- 
ment even in its cruelest forms if so be that he 
might save men from themselves and unto 
God. At once Peter showed how elementary, 
after all, was his finding of the Saviour. Christ 


118 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


—sacrifice!—these two ought not to be brought 
together; he is a King. 

What gulis still lie between Peter and his 
Lord, divisions upon quite fundamental ideas 
of life! Christ’s task with Peter now, as with 
all who have found him, is to teach him to see 
things differently. “You think the way men 
think,” says Jesus, “not the way God thinks!”! 
And Jesus pronounces Peter’s ideas as being of 
the adversary of our souls. Peter must be 
taught to see things as God sees them, think 
as God thinks, disown the viewpoint of worldly 
men and get the viewpoint of God. For a man 
to be able to think like that would be salva- 
tion, and every temper and idea in him that 
yields to God’s way is evidence of salvation in 
progress. Once Saint John lifted the veil. “It 
doth not yet appear what we shall be, but we 
know that when he shall appear we shall be 
like him.”’ A Saviour indeed, if he makes us 
Christs!—but not by stamping upon us his 
image. Rather he arouses the Christ that 
sleeps in all and guides that Christ at last to 
completest self-expression, until we are like 
himself, but uttered through our own gifts and 
characteristics, our own individuality. And 
here is his method—the teaching of men to 
think as God thinks. 

1 See T. R. Glover: The Jesus of History, p. 91. 


SALVATION 119 


But that is a long process, and in the mean- 
time one may say that though in some measure 
he has found the Saviour, he is merely paddling 
in shallows; he wants the deeps. Perhaps he 
thinks of Augustine, Wesley, Beecher, desiring 
an enthusiasm for Christ such as they had. 

Very well; when the disciples asked to share 
with Jesus experiences of coronation and 
power he answered swiftly by questions con- 
cerning their readiness to share also his “cup” 
and his “baptism.” There are prices for what 
you would have. Beecher gloried in Christ, 
but that was not cheaply bought. No man 
may put down a dime and expect to reap a 
treasury; he cannot laze with hands in pockets 
and expect to master the mountains. Would 
you discover an enthusiasm based not upon 
tricks of temperament or upon mystical 
facilities, but upon sheer judicial perception of 
Christ’s preeminence—an enthusiasm of the 
intellect? What price will you pay? There are 
moral prices of subordination to Christ’s spirit 
and law, and there are intellectual prices of 
examination and analysis of him and of his 
place in world affairs. Therefore, are you pre- 
pared to study economics until you find that 
the only healing influences among them all are 
such as have made Galilee forever beloved? 
Will you turn to international affairs and see 


120 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


the nations at their wits’ ends and find that 
the only things that are shaping toward perma- 
nence and which are promising any dawn 
amidst the darkness are the cry for peace, the 
demand for brotherhood and justice, the things 
of Jesus? And will you renounce the Christian 
faith as not for you and say, “I shall find a 
religion of my own’? And, having found it, 
will you not write it down that you may look 
upon it, and so begin to see with amazement 
that in essence it is Christianity after all? 
The Christian ethic, the Christian idea of God, 
and the Christian regard for man are things 
that must not be absent from any religion that 
is likely to feed the soul. Always we thrust 
him aside and go our way, to find him standing 
in our path. It is this discovery of how in- 
escapable he is, of how he indeed is the Saviour, 
the Way, the Truth, the Life, that lifts one’s 
enthusiasms high above the realm of the 
traditional or the conventional, establishing 
them upon those sound and very satisfying 
bases that are found in a personal perception 
of truth. Howbeit, this is achieved by diligence: 
such assessments of Christ can only follow 
upon diligent comparisons, examinations, and 
measurements. It is a great road, leading high; 
all who have in any measure found the Christ 
are upon it; some are farther along than others. 


‘SALVATION 121 


Though for all the direction is the same, some 
by quicker travel come to the greater explora- 
tions earlier. 


IV 


In the meantime, here and now, there is, for 
every one of us, this: “Believe on the Lord 
Jesus Christ and thou shalt be saved.” He 
stands for a certain philosophy of life—do you 
believe in that? He stands for a particular 
interpretation of God—do you believe in that? 
He stands for an evaluation of man—do you 
believe in that? In the elections you are asked 
which man you believe in; you consider all 
each man stands for, and you cast your vote. 
Whom do you believe in; Christ? Mohammed? 
Mammon? Mars? Bacchus? Do you believe 
in Big Business? Big Learning? Big Enjoy- 
ment? “Believe on the Lord Jesus Christ and 
thou shalt be saved.” For salvation is not some 
gift to be had hereafter, nor is it a complete 
thing which God gives to us upon our fulfill- 
ment of certain conditions. Rather it is a 
reclamation of life from selfish and materialistic 
living; it begins the moment the centers of our 
life are rightly adjusted; it continues in- 
definitely, in this world and the next. The 
right adjustments come when men “believe on 


122 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


the Lord Jesus Christ.” If you will not bring 
your personality to deliberate affirmation of 
the moral and spiritual attitudes of Jesus, you 
may describe yourself as “lost,” for declining 
him you are affirming in yourself the forces of 
moral and_ spiritual decay and_ blindness. 
Dogma and detail. aside, we have seen nothing 
higher than Christ. Henceforth no man can 
ignore him without being unfaithful to light; 
but no man can affirm him in the centers of life, 
believe in him, without at once discovering 
that health, that redemption, and that recon- 
ciliation with God and with man, which are 
“the salvation which is in Christ Jesus,’ and 
which have ever spread wide the white wings 
of God’s “good news’’ to the children of men. 


THE CHURCH 
I 


For some years it has been a cheap and 
popular pastime to abuse the church. Intel- 
lectuals have flung at her their polished javelins, 
some of which have struck deep; many whips 
have been made for less skillful hands to wield, 
and their vicious hiss has been heard in the 
streets. Even the rabble have assailed her, 
counting no sanctity too white to discourage 
their verbal mud. Very much of this has been 
as unseemly as the spittal of a toad directed 
at the moon, which both leaves unsoiled the 
fair Queen of Night and publishes the where- 
abouts of toadishness. Reasons for renouncing 
the church have often been of a kind either to 
shake all the gods on Olympus with hilarity or 
reduce them to tears at man’s poverty of 
invention. “I have given up going to church; 
there are too many hypocrites there.” 

“Oh, don’t let that prevent you: there’s 
room for one more!” 

But some of the charges have been seriously 


leveled. We are charged with being conserv- 
123 


124 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


ative and bigoted, the enemies of new light 
and fuller truth; on the other hand, with being 
devoid of vital faith in the things we preach; 
with having so lowered the standard of life 
demanded of a follower of Christ that it is no 
longer possible to see whether a man be a 
follower or not. It is said that we have re- 
solved Christian character into questions of 
social caution, guarded pastimes, and church 
attendance, but have omitted the weightier 
matters of honor in business, gentleness in the 
home, purity in society, fairness in sport; that 
we have pandered to wealth and patronized the 
poor, rebuked sin in the gutter and ignored it 
in the parlor, been swift to see industrial 
selfishness when made unlovely by the sweat and 
coarse clothes of a class that cannot claim great 
possessions, but singularly insensible to it when 
it is dressed in the refinements of wealth and 
power; we are charged with taking our religion 
easily, so that it means little to us and costs 
us less, and with therefore having lost the 
spirit of daring and of sacrifice. Some of these 
are serious charges, and I, for one, lest I should 
be guilty of repudiating lightly indictments 
that should rather bring me penitential to my 
knees, will strive to remember before them 
and apply to myself Cromwell’s exasperated 
appeal to the Scotch Parliament: “TI beseech 


THE CHURCH 125 


you, by the mercies of God, to consider that 
you might sometimes be wrong.” 

And yet, as one who knows churches and 
church folks at least as well as many of their 
critics, I protest that blemish and paralysis 
and narrowness and bias are by no means the 
whole truth about them, nor is this the truth 
that is most characteristic of them. One be- 
comes gentler in his judgments as his knowl- 
edge of life improves. He can see that the 
church is made up of human beings, and that 
always means imperfection. He can see that 
the church is not doing its work unless it is 
gathering to itself the imperfect, the weak, the 
halt, the maimed, the blind, nursing the 
broken-hearted, supporting those who stumble. 
I know the commercialized business man comes 
to church: thank God he does, it is the only 
place he can find where commercialism weakens. 
I know the narrow and bigoted are found there, 
though by no means only there, and they are 
made a little bigger by contact with eternal 
things. The lapsed are found there too, and 
are in the way of being restored. Insipid and 
uninteresting folk are present, gathered out of 
many gray and dull places, their poor lives 
yielding up a little of their gray and taking a 
little better color as they hear the great truths 
that make the rich romance of living. Also 


126 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


there come the great souls of the community, 
the noble dreamers, the eager hands that would 
serve. And, I have found, these people are not 
flippant; they are deeply in earnest; they 
mean business. It is not the church but the 
thing they find there that brings them, some- 
thing which picture shows never supply, which 
books are inadequate for, which is found 
nowhere else. And men come from their gloom, 
their cruelty, their ugliness and crookedness, 
knowing more than ever you can tell them of 
their baseness and all that, and sick of heart 
because of it; but they come strangely hunger- 
ing for the beauty and the sweetness of the 
Lord. They take their little particles of him 
and go hence—to forget, maybe, in the swirl of 
things, but not quite to eseape—bearing a little 
added flavor in life’s common things, a flavor 
that is not unfamiliar to such as lingered with 
Christ in that Galilean land of flowers where 
he was the fairest, purest, strongest, bravest of 
all, and a flavor which is quickly recognized 
again wherever it is met in street or home or 
shop. 


II 


The story of Jesus could not die. If the 
church should fail to lift him up, another way 


THE CHURCH 127 


would be found. But then any other organiza- 
tion doing that would be a church, and still, I 
can imagine, it would not be perfect. We have 
this treasure in earthen vessels. The thing of 
paramount moment, however, is the treasure. 
For this treasure is a living thing and giveth 
life unto the world, and, of all things else, men 
need it! The church’s right to live abides only 
so long as she “guards the deposit,’ Christ, 
intrusted to her, making him always available 
to the world. 

Can a forest of firs renounce its type and be- 
come a grove of palms? Such an experiment 
would banish the spirit of life from the forest 
and would lead, by folly and confusion, to a 
death which would not have even the dignity 
of a petrified forest, which at least is true to 
type even in death. The Church of Jesus Christ 
remains true to type only by preserving the 
centrality of Christ. The Spirit’s business is 
the expounding of the things of Christ, not of 
another—no, not of Bergson, nor of Karl Marx, 
nor of H. G. Wells, nor of another, though all 
these are in place in the church when they are 
made to assist the Spirit in his unfolding of 
the Christ. Christ will forever increase and 
change, though he will be the same yesterday, 
to-day, and forever. Underneath all that the 
centuries bring, the church, if it is to remain 


128 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Christian, must preserve the Christ as its 
Root. This idea of the Christ-root tempts 
examination, being full of suggestion. 

There are those who point out to us that 
the Christ of the modern church has no counter- 
part in history; that we have so worked over 
the original figure of the Nazarene that it is 
no longer possible for any man to say what 
part of the picture ever lived and what part 
has been acquired by centuries of devotion; 
that we really adore an apotheosis of Jesus, a 
conception approximating much more closely 
the idealism of the race rather than anyone 
who ever walked in Galilee. Hence, “Who is 
Christ?” we are asked, and “How shall we 
know any more the original?” 

But any tree, while depending vitally upon 
its root, yet holds within itself much that the 
root never knows. There is water present, for 
instance, In a quantity such as the root could 
never have held. As the root throws its life 
up into the tree, it draws from sod and air 
and sun myriad qualities with which it did 
not begin, and yet who will say of the tree, 
“Thou art false! or, perchance, an illusion’’? 
Conceivably you will say, “Until I can draw 
some line of demarcation between the original 
root and what has been acquired, I shall not 
be satisfied.” Who ever drew lines of demarca- 


THE CHURCH 129 


tion in thmgs that live? Who can separate 
between spirit and body, or mind and brain, 
or the things which the root began with and 
the things it has acquired? Life has ever this 
mystery! We seek in vain its solution. But in 
the day when I would seek rest from the sun’s 
burning, or would cut me timber for a house, 
I will forget my speculations, and, seeking the 
tree, will accept of it all it can give. 

Because there is something eternally living 
in Christ, he is the continually increasing 
Christ. If it be true that he has-added to 
himself things that make his present. picture 
difficult to reconcile with the features of him 
of Galilee, we can only answer: “Nineteen 
hundred years and more have gone; what else 
does one expect? For he lives!’ Jesus has 
shown the power to collect about him the 
idealism of a world. Man’s highest, tenderest 
dreams have somehow woven themselves into 
his garments, and he has worn them as a king 
for whom such robes are natural. He has been 
a wondrous magnet, drawing the best out of 
men to himself, and himself growing larger by 
what he thus gathers. Thus he is not merely 
the Christ of the Gospels; he is larger, as a 
tree is larger than its root. But this Tree 
which is Christ is as real as the Root which 
was Jesus. Without the Root there could have 


130 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


been no such Tree; yet no longer will men be 
able to disentangle the elements of the de- 
veloped Tree from the elements of the original 
Root. Was slavery abolished because of the 
ethic of Jesus or because of the improved 
conscience of the race? Do we thank Jesus for 
the improved status of women or do we thank 
advancing civilization? Are our ideas of God 
gentler because the times are so or because 
Jesus taught us so? Surely, it is apparent that 
in none of these can we draw confident dis- 
tinctions and say, “On this side is Christ, and 
on that is some other.’ Rather we shall say 
in answer to each of the questions, as one 
might answer if asked whether the root or some 
other part explains the blossoms on the tree, 
“Both!” 

Howbeit, in the hour when I am beaten by 
angry winds and need shelter, burned by the 
sun and need shade; in the day when my heart 
is breaking and no man gives me consolation, 
when, spent in moral strength and sick in 
spirit, I need refuge and support and healing, 
then I shall not remember my speculations, but 
shall resort to that Tree whose leaves in all 
the centuries have proved themselves to be 
set for the “healing of the nations.” When I 
would find timbers to build me “more stately 
mansions’ that my manhood may escape 


— ad _ 


THE CHURCH 131 


from its littleness and penury and lift its 
towers into fairer skies, I shall not pause until 
the mystery of the tree is solved. Rather I 
shall seek its ample boughs, that I may take 
therefrom the only timbers that can nobly 
build a man. There is enough in our Lord 
Jesus Christ to exercise the intellect of man 
for generations yet, and—who knows—forever! 
But in the meantime, the glad meantime, there 
abides in him all that the heart and spirit of 
man may need for their healing, and their up- 
building. 


Til 


Once, jostled among men in the narrow 
streets of Milan—not finding there, amidst un- 
lovely scenes, much to woo the heart to affec- 
tion for humankind—I escaped into the great 
Cathedral and mounted by stairways to the 
roof. Looking down from the roof upon the 
city, I began to find it possible to acquire a 
better perspective. Little houses no longer 
overshadowed me, narrow streets no longer 
cramped me, and unlovely examples of hu- 
manity no longer shuffled past, jostling me as 
they went. I was seeing the city from above, 
and humanity too. Seeing it thus, I began to 
realize that if I would know humanity I must 


132 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


estimate it in the light of this Cathedral upon 
which I stood, one of humanity’s vastest sym- 
bols, an outward and visible sign of what was 
really man. For wrought into this Cathedral 
was humanity at its best, and as it loves to be, 
its dreams and hopes and aspirations, its 
devoted labor, its sense of God. Thus the 
dignity of man, hidden in the streets, became 
impressively apparent in the Cathedral. In this 
mood I raised my eyes to behold, far beyond 
the confines of the city, outlined against the 
sky, closing the distant view, Mount Blanc, 
Queen of the Alps! In a moment her white 
forehead, resting there against heaven, had 
carried my thoughts from man to God. 

It seems to me that this is what Christ is 
always doing for us. In him we recover noble 
estimates of man; in him also we see the wide 
horizons and find God. If it be true that the 
centuries have wrought into the Cathedral 
Christ more than was present originally in 
Galilee, this only makes him more truly than 
ever the highest personification of humanity 
and of divinity. In Christ humanity still 
climbs highest, and divinity still draws nearest. 

John the Divine saw seven golden candle- 
sticks, representing the church, and in the 
midst, an the midst of the church, where we 
must forever keep him, One like unto a son of 


THE CHURCH 133 


man. Here is simplicity itself, reminding one 
of the exquisite charm of the Master who 
walked with men as one of them, and spoke 
our human tongue on many a windy hillside 
and amid the rustling of golden corn, and who 
poured out a human heart in prayer beneath 
the Syrian stars. But John makes this son of 
man say immediately, “I am the first and the 
last.” This is always the puzzle. He says 
things that only God ought to say, talks of 
ultimates and identifies himself with them. Yet 
somehow he is right, and one day we will see 
how. But in the meantime what can we do? 
What else is there to do, for one who ponders 
the mystery and bright, warm beauty of the 
Lord, except to do as did John, who, gazing, 
“fell at his feet as one dead.” 

This, at the feet of the Master, is the only 
place for the church if she is to retain her 
inward inspiration, her vision, and her saving 
message to mankind. We shall not pretend 
she has lost it, but neither shall we say that 
she may not make it more conscious and 
devoted. 


THE CHURCH 
(CONCLUDED) 


I 


From such thoughts as these concerning the 
church and its mission one turns back to the 
world in which we live, asking himself, doubt- 
fully, ‘““Have I been dreaming—or waking?” 
These values of the church seem to be little 
enough realized if they be true! Where there 
is not actual antagonism toward the church 
there is widespread indifference, and in multi- 
tudes there is an attitude much like that to- 
ward an old heirloom. For sentimental reasons 
it may still be allowed its place on the shelf, 
but no one will suspect it of possessing utility, 
and it will be forgotten except when it gets in 
the way. 

Yet, if count could be made, probably it 
would be found that no organization under 
heaven gathers within itself such a weight of 
first-class intellect as does the Church of 
Christ. A house burning, however, always 
arrests more attention than a house building, 
and the destructive critic is usually more heard 


and published than the constructive. The 
134 


THE CHURCH 135 


superior, and often more than half contemptu- 
ous, attitude of some intellectuals to the church 
has had much influence in the world, and is 
the more regrettable because it is often unin- 
formed. It is time some things were said very 
frankly concerning this. 

After all, the merely scientific mind is not 
the authority on those religious matters for 
which the church stands. Ability in biology or 
history is no smallest qualification for apprehen- 
sion of God, who, being a Spirit, can be laid 
hold of no more by scientific learning than a 
physical hand can lay hold of a thought. This 
is not always realized, and proficiency in 
chemistry has given sufficient encouragement 
to some men to pronounce upon religion. How 
eager certain men of much knowledge of some 
things seem to be to show how little they know 
of others! How pathetically the same brain 
can carry side by side the giant idea and the 
pigmy notion! What feeble caricatures of 
religious truth can beset the mind of even the 
scholar, and how religiously behind his times 
can be the man who is possibly ahead of them 
in knowledge physical! 

Thank God for learning; it is helping to 
emancipate the world; but many things are 
hidden from the wise and prudent and revealed 
to babes. Many an illiterate Negro woman 


136 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


will annoy us with her obstinate “superstition” 
that will not yield to our conclusive proofs. 
Back of the “‘superstition”’ there is an experience 
which she mangles in phrasing, but what then? 
Is she to forego the living and burning center 
of all life at the impatient and undiscerning 
behest of some materialistic scholar? She has 
an experience that is a closed world to him 
and, in so far as she can understand his high- 
sounding scorn and protest, she knows in her 
simple way that he is talking dogmatic igno- 
rance. Across many centuries comes a voice: 
“Whither shall I go from thy spirit? or whither 
shall I flee from thy presence?...If I take 
the wings of the morning and dwell in the 
uttermost parts of the sea; even there shall thy 
hand lead me and thy right hand shall hold 
me!’ Millions of the world’s choicest in brain 
and soul have shared that experience. 

When a broad-based, robust, positive soul, 
knowing whom it has believed, is met by a 
sort of spindle-shanked spiritual emasculation 
squeaking shrill denial, I am reminded of a man 
I heard of in France. He had been a politician 
before getting into khaki, and evidently had 
acquired the habit of delivering himself with 
equal authority upon any and every subject— 
a task to be cautiously undertaken by any man. 
Having versed himself in all the military text- 


THE CHURCH 137 


books he could get hold of, he became con- 
vinced that the war was not being won because 
of inherent falsity in the military methods. He 
arrived in France imbued with a mission of 
adjustment and reformation. I forget what 
became of him, but they used to talk about 
him in the brigade. He came as a tenderfoot 
late to the war to teach veterans who had lived 
for years immersed in all the fierce experience 
of fighting, who had found the falsity of the 
textbooks three years before he arrived, who 
had adjusted and reformed and reformed and 
adjusted in more ways than he had dreamed, 
and who knew all his pallid little expatiations 
about war lacked only one thing—some first- 
hand knowledge of the thing he talked about! 
Those men could not stop to argue with him, 
not merely because they were busy but because 
it is rather futile to seek to convince a man 
who lacks experience. When a man knows 
through having dwelt where shells are bursting, 
paper theories and contradictions do seem a 
little sickly! Like Diogenes waving Alexander 
aside, we may well request such men to stand 
from between us and the sun! 


If 


Probably more potent than this attitude of 
a few intellectuals as a foil to the church’s 


138 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


work and influence are such practical counter- 
attractions as the modern picture show, auto- 
mobile, and the not modern but now more 
accessible charm of God’s out-of-doors. In 
accepting this last to a neglect of “‘the assem- 
bling of ourselves together” in a church, there 
are many who claim that they lose nothing 
thereby in spiritual values. “‘Where two or 
three are gathered together in my name there 
am I in the midst of them,”’ quotes the church. 
“But I understood,” these answer, “that God 
was everywhere. “In the midst of them’: yes, 
but is he not also in the midst of the hills and 
the flowers and the stars, and may not one 
find him as easily by climbing the hills as by 
coming to church? Is he more in one place 
than in another, that we should seek him 
there?” 

While we grant the accessibility of God any- 
where, it may be well for us to face the huge 
amount of insincere speech made concerning 
these meetings with him in nature. “It does 
me more good to be out in the air and the 
sunlight than to sit in a gloomy church where 
nobody thinks oi anything but hats and 
dresses.” That anyone should be capable of 
such a conception of church life reasons sad 
need of grace from some quarter! If one indeed 
finds God out of doors, he speedily comes to a 


THE CHURCH 139 


juster estimate of his brethren. But is it God 
who is found, or esthetics? Is the tonic physical 
or spiritual? Granted the disentangling cannot 
be achieved so easily, is not the spirztual benefit 
a little over-reported? What is the issue in 
character and service? After all, if one is find- 
ing God anywhere, the fact ought to be written 
beyond dispute in one’s behavior. Though 
God is everywhere, and everywhere is the re- 
warder of them that diligently seek him, it is 
doubtful whether even the theory is sound that 
he may be found “‘just as well” in nature as in 
church. But in practical experience, to what 
extent do the majority desire to find God out 
of doors? And to what extent are the deposits 
in their lives actually moral and religious? 
When in the community a wholesome reform 
is needed and men are called to the standard, 
do we find that those who come because they 
have been learning to see life from the moral 
standpoint of God, and to feel for men with 
the earnest solicitation of God, are chiefly the — 
men who have indifferently neglected the 
church while spending Sunday elsewhere? Do 
not misconceive this point: it is not that all 
virtue is the church’s and all helpfulness. But 
it is an emphasis of the practical experience of 
life, namely, that we do not find that non- 
churchgoers discover the rest of heart, or the 


140 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


high direction of life, or the wholesome devo- 
tion to the cause of God and man which come 
by genuine life with God. 

The explanation of the Sunday exodus to the 
country is not to be found chiefly in a search 
for God. His mystic presence is everywhere, 
but he is more readily discoverable in some 
places than in others. It may be true that he 
is present in any company of men, but it is in 
the midst of disciples gathered together in his 
name that he is most likely to be discovered. 
He is present everywhere, but there is a “special 
presence,” that is to say, there are places and 
times when he is specially realized. God was 
at Bethel before Jacob arrived and while he 
dwelt there unconscious of anything divine. 
Yet there came to Jacob an experience which 
made him say: “‘Lo, God was in this place and 
I knew it not.”” When it is so often quoted that 
“Earth’s crammed with heaven and every 
common bush afire with God,” it is apparently 
assumed that everybody sees him. Yet the 
poet continues: “But only he who sees takes 
off his shoes; the rest sit round it and pluck 
blackberries.”’ Presence! how little that signifies 
to some! But, as I am about to point out, 
while God is present no more in the church 
than on the sea or the great plains, in the 
church are certain helpful factors absent else- 


THE CHURCH 141 


where, and by these the presence of God is 
made specially realizable. 


iit 


The first of these factors is the company 
which, gathered in One Name, is sympathetic, 
partaking of the same spirit and desire. What 
then, happens? “‘There is a common telepathic 
pull which increases the responsiveness of each.” 
We have seen men of calm blood roused 
to madness in a crowd by some destructive 
idea that has possessed it; such is the power of 
the massed mind. What shall we say, then, of 
the uplifting and enlarging power of a large 
company splendidly possessed with the search 
for God? If but half an audience is gathered 
with sincere desire to commune with God, one 
may guarantee, in the name of Heaven, and 
of the pure constraints of united spirit, that the 
varying degrees of carelessness and deadness 
in the other half will break down before the 
hour of worship is over. If every day I am 
compelled to submit, whether I like it or not, 
to influences cast about me from other souls, 
and if often those influences are drowsing to 
my nobler instincts, will you not admit that I 
am not fair to my own soul if I deny it the 
stimulating company of men and women aim- 


142 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


ing Godward? Siren voices and voices celestial 
are always singing. If there are a thousand 
influences that quicken my hearing of the 
lower, how great a treasure will be that com- 
pany which is able to wrap its sympathetic 
mind about me until my hearing of the higher 
is arrested, and aroused! 

In the second place, the church garners and 
carries onward the inspiration of the ages. 
From the wide fields of the past treasures are 
gathered and cast into the lap of the present. 
Chaff indeed comes with the wheat, and that 
we are busily blowing away by the help of 
God. But there is bread from the past, and 
it may not be too much to say that he who 
proclaims his entire independence of the past 
and sets himself to feed his soul only on what 
he can rear on his own little acreage, will die 
before his sowing can come to maturity. What 
would you do with a statesman who declined 
to learn from Edmund Burke and John Stuart 
Mill and all the masters of statecraft from the 
time of Rome and Athens? You would say he 
was either a madman or a prig, and you would 
refuse him your vote because you would feel 
you could not trust such insolently independent 
strutting in a responsible position. And what 
would you say of a youth who, setting out to 
learn the wizard’s art of making sculptured 


THE CHURCH 143 


beauty rise lifelike from a block of marble, 
began by refusing to study Phidias and Praxi- 
teles and Michelangelo, with the wealth of 
experience that those names represent. 

What, then, will you say of a man who finds 
himself the inheritor of personal powers he 
must learn to govern, and of a crude, unshapen 
soul from which he should cause to arise a 
character after the likeness of a god, but who 
deems himself sufficient for the task and so 
snubs the spiritual statecraft and sculpture of 
the past? Nearly two thousand years of the 
Christian era, two thousand years of experience 
with Christ, two thousand years of thinking, 
loving, serving, of the thrilling university of 
Life, whence each generation learns some new 
syllable and passes it down into the ever- 
enlarging treasury of the next—twenty cen- 
turies of it, and what will you say of the man 
who thinks he can ignore it and prosper? In 
the church the ages are focused. We read them 
in the Scriptures, we sing them in the hymn- 
book; they utter themselves through the pulpit. 
While numbers facilitate more sensitive response 
to God, the giant saints and brains of the past 
are pressing the immortal part of themselves 
upon us, giving our response intelligence and 
direction, warning, advising, calling, encourag- 
ing. It is one phase of the “communion of 


144 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


saints,’ which is scarcely to be had except in 
the Church of God. 

The third factor is the preacher. We gladly 
admit that God expresses himself in a sunset 
or in a breaking wave, but God’s greatest 
facility of self-expression is through a person. 
The higher the type—the more excellent the 
medium for God. For this reason Jesus is the 
best revelation of God we know. Ethically 
and religiously, Jesus is the supreme Master, 
able to lay his commands upon the centuries, 
because, as he said, “The words that I speak 
unto you I speak not of myself, but the Father 
that dwelleth in me, he doeth the works.” 
Back of Jesus and through him, was God! 

God’s methods do not change. Still he 
possesses men and through them shows himself 
better than anywhere else. I must say that, 
unless my conception of the preacher’s office is 
wrong, the preacher should be the most arous- 
ing and compelling revelation of God the wide 
world holds. Allowing for faults of learning 
and ability, for errors of judgment and slips in 
behavior, the man whose life is dedicated to 
the highest, who dwells much with thoughts 
and with masters who teach him to see life 
from the pinnacles; to whom, isolated upon the 
summits of the soul, the jangling voices of the 
moment become a distant murmur, as in the 


THE CHURCH 145 


awful silence he hears the solemn and unhasten- 
ing tramp of God’s permanencies; to whom, 
his spirit thrilling to fragments of God’s primal 
music as they rise above earth’s discords, there 
is audible the Voice that speaks only when men 
are able to hear, pouring into his heart messages 
that provoke and burn and impassion until 
he knows he has heard things it is not possible 
for a man to utter: I say that that man, when 
he has come down from the mount, will make 
no apology for his message, nor will he ask you 
if you will hear, but he will speak as one having 
authority, and he will proceed to cast out 
devils that would yield to no one else. If the 
preacher has enabled Ged to possess him, it is 
not_the preacher who persuades his audience; 
it is God. The mystic presence discoverable 
among the hills? Yes; but if the preacher is 
doing his work faithfully (one must write 
almost in an agony of self-reproof!) when he is 
done the lesser discovery will pale before the 
vaster revelation, until the congregation retires 
with hushed voices saying, “I have seen an 
incarnation of God!’ 


CHARACTER 


I 


WHATEVER to the contrary may be sup- 
posed in some quarters, words like “‘repression,”’ 
“emaciation,’ “paucity”? are not typically 
Christian. Christianity as Christ represents it, 
never makes for contraction in either man’s 
work or man’s play, in his intellect or in his 
worship. 

Such words as ‘“‘amplitude, plentitude,”’ 
“expansion,” “abundance” are far more sym- 
pathetic to Christ and the effects wrought by 
his influence. “life”? is our Lord’s supreme 
word: he poured it into poor spent bodies as 
he went; he roused it into drooping faith; he 
quickened the intellect; he found broken 
hearts which, under the afflictions of the world, 
had not been able to hold their treasures, and 
he gently took them, and bound them, and 
made of them chalices brimming again with 
life; he found religion in his day entombed in 
precise and rigid externalism and ritual, and 
with the authority of the very Lord of Life 
he called it to resurrection. 


To increase life is his enthusiastic employ- 
146 


39 66 


CHARACTER 147 


ment, as if he knew that the ache at the world’s 
heart, the bitterness, the complaint, is always, 
whether it is so understood or not, from the 
absence of life. 

The great Master’s mission was the making 
of men, their enrichment unto life, and life 
abundant. Under his influence men grow and 
amplify, the type enhances, the unpronounced 
manhood lifts itself into vivid self-expression. | 


II 


If we are to appreciate how Christ accom- 
plishes this, we will do well to inquire of the 
nature of “life.” Perhaps the old and imperfect 
definition used long ago by Drummond may 
not refuse us some help: “Life is correspon- 
dence with environment.” Eyes that do not 
see are dead; the paralyzed arm is unable to 
correspond with its environment; intellectual 
life unfolds more and more as the intellect is 
related to wider realms of truth; the soul is 
dead to the extent in which it has lost corres- 
pondence with God. A characteristic of life 
everywhere seems to be capacity for inter- 
action with environment. 

Man lives in a world wherein his environment 
is both human and divine. That which cripples 
his correspondence with either to that extent 


148 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


diminishes his life. Therefore the effort of 
Jesus is to bring men into right relations with 
both. Men inveterately believe that life’s 
prizes are to be found in selfishness, and, in 
their pursuit of pleasure or of possessions, they 
strain all effort to serve their own selves. 
Nothing under heaven is harder to break than 
that infatuation. And yet by the experience 
of long, long centuries of depleted and dis- 
illusioned humanity, selfishness is narrowing to 
enjoyment, deflating to exhilaration; and, in- 
stead of life, it leaves only ashes. But care for | 
mankind, an acceptance of responsibility to our 
fellows—not the pagan disowning of our brother 
but the Christian assent to our being his 
keeper—this widens the area of our interests 
and of our enthusiasms, tempts life to ever 
wider expansions and never lets it pall. It is 
by such correspondence with our human environ- 
ment that we live with life more abundant. 

But there is our divine environment, God, 
in whom “we live and move and have our 
being.” To lose God is to be left with a world 
—and nothing more! Remove from Words- 
worth that “something far more deeply inter- 
fused,” and the light will have died from his 
sunsets, the music from his waterfalls, the 
mystery from his hills; the world will have 
become a machine and its explorers merely a 


CHARACTER 149 


tribe of skilled mechanics. One needs God for 
the romance of living. As the soul increases 
in correspondence with him it increases in 
exuberant life. 


Til 


Therefore Jesus gives his attention to cor- 
recting correspondences, for he is anxious to 
have men live, and live abundantly. He © 
approaches the problem differently from others, 
and his voice sounds as a new thing among 
his people. Familiar with Moses and his neg- 
atives, and with his stressing of behavior, they 
were not quick to realize the world of difference 
between the familiar code of laws and the 
method of Jesus. Neither are we. Too often 
have we represented the Master as concerning 
himself with words and actions, with the 
things we do or leave undone. Too often, 
again, we have conceived the Christian ethic 
to be chiefly “Don’t”; but that is rather 
Mosaism. Imagine Saul of Tarsus asking Jesus 
the way of life and being told to abstain from 
committing robbery and murder. He might 
reply: “I have abstained from these and many 
other things all my life, but still I have an 
empty heart.” So Jesus says: “Except your 
righteousness shall exceed the righteousness of 
the scribes and Pharisees, ye shall in no case 


150 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


enter into the kingdom of heaven’’; that is, 
unless your righteousness be superior in kind. 

For the kingdom of heaven is not negative 
but positive; “Thou shalt love,” says Christ. 
Neither is it external—a code of laws to be 
obeyed: On-the contrary, it is a spirit, a 
temper, a relationship. “Thou shalt love,” says 
Christ, but love is a condition of the spirit, 
which, though indeed expressed in behavior, 
is not itself behavior. But of this key Christian 
word, Dr. Richard Roberts! makes this timely 
utterance: “There is little more urgent in the 
interests of sound thinking and clear speech 
than some rehabilitation of this word ‘love,’ its 
rescue from the slough of saccharine senti- 
mentalism and its recognition as the generic 
name of those human impulses which constitute 
the many-colored energy of social cohesion.” 
And he strengthens this by quoting Professor 
Rauschenbusch who defines love as “No flicker- 
ing or wayward emotion, but the energy of a 
steadfast will bent on creating fellowship.” In 
that definition Rauschenbusch has achieved 
something almost classic; the terms of it 
deserve to be returned to and _ separately 
weighed, so much significance attaches to each. 
“Thou shalt love,” insists Christ, and such 
insistence is neither negative nor external. 


1 The Red Cap on the Cross, p. 62. 


CHARACTER 151 


Neither are other great words of the Christian 
gospel—such a word, for instance, as “‘recon- 
ciliation.”” Like “love” it is not descriptive of 
action but of attitude; action may express 
reconciliation or love but it was the spirit 
behind action that Jesus sought to correct, and 
until that was corrected a man was not saved 
—no, not though he polished his behavior as 
a sculptor might perfect his marble, leaving 
it when he had done all, neither warm nor 
breathing. Christ’s Sermon on the Mount 
should never be hardened into legislation; 
rather it is a series of councils and illustrations, 
seeking, from many angles, to inculcate the 
same spirit. Obedience to rule can rapidly 
grow mechanical and fail to touch the spirit. 
“Thou shalt not kill,” said the law. “It is 
inadequate,” says Jesus; “if you nurse anger, 
you are guilty.” “Thou shalt not commit 
adultery,” said the law, and it was echoed by 
the scribes and Pharisees. “If you carry lustful 
intentions,’ says Jesus, exceeding the righteous- 
ness of the scribes and Pharisees, “you have 
committed adultery already in your heart.” 
You see how he passes to the realm of spirit 
and reason, and demands that there the man 
shall fight his battles and win his victories, for 
there is character and not in the outward per- 
formance of religious or social demands. — 


152 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Thus does Jesus endeavor to adjust relations 
between man and his environment, human and 
divine. “I came that they may have life, and 
may have it abundantly,”’ he says. Precisely; 
he that will learn of Jesus already begins to 
move into more abundant life. There is a 
fuller arousal of the man; in the midst of fields 
of inertia a pulse begins to beat. 

But there are phases in the ensuing develop- 
ment. They cannot be disentangled, for they 
grow together, and each becomes increasingly 
marked as the man comes more under the law 
of Christ, which is love, and “‘love,”’ be it remem- 
bered, “‘is the energy of a steadfast will bent on 
creating fellowship.” 


IV 


It may not be correct to say that man in 
Christ becomes a law unto himself, for he 
must live under the reign of the law of right 
relationships, which, properly speaking, is a 
spirit, a temper. But he lives no longer under 
any other law. None can legislate for him; 
rules and codes exist for him no longer. Possess- 
ing the spirit of Christ, his one business comes 
to be exposition of the requirements of that 
spirit in the presence of each new situation as 
it arises; he administers the law of the Spirit. 
The judge on his bench does not make the 


CHARACTER 153 


laws but he administers them, arbitrating as 
each new case is brought before him. For the 
Christian man there is but one law, and in its 
light each case is arbitrated upon as it comes. 
This privilege is denied to two—the child and 
the man untuned to Christ. 

1. The child, either in years or in develop- 
ment, cannot be intrusted with this law. The 
learning of the divine art of right living must’ 
begin much as that of any other art. Years 
ago Sir John R. Seely put this so well that he 
may be quoted: “For the beginner rigid rules 
are prescribed, which it will be well for him 
for a time to follow punctiliously and blindly. 
He may believe that under these rules a princi- 
ple is concealed, that a reason could be given 
why they should be followed, but it is well for 
a time that the principle should remain con- 
cealed and that the rules should be followed 
simply because they are prescribed. At any 
rate, so long as he actually has not discovered 
the principle, he must abide strictly by the 
rules, and it would be foolish to abandon them 
in order to go in search of it. But there comes 
a time when the discovery is made, a golden 
moment of silent expansion and enlargement. 
Then the reason of all the discipline to which 
he has submitted becomes clear to him, the 
principle reveals itself and makes the confused 


154 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


and ill-apprehended multitude of details in a 
moment harmonious and luminous. But the prin- 
ciple at the same moment that it explains the 
rules supersedes them. They may not be less true 
than before, they may be seen to be true far more 
clearly than before. But they are obsolete; their 
use is gone; they can for the future tell only 
that which is already well known, which can 
never again be forgotten or misunderstood.”! 
2. The man who has not sincerely adopted 
the law of Christ must not demand its privi- 
leges. Many a man claims for himself a liberty 
of decision and arbitration which is entirely 
without justification unless the temper of his 
life recognizes that he is here to be a saviour. 
The judges of this country are privileged to 
administer the laws of the United States, not 
of France or of Mexico; neither must they 
administer according to their own feelings or 
prejudices or interests, but only according to 
the laws of the land. You must not claim the 
privileges of Christ unless you are Christ’s; 
you have no freedom to do as you like until 
you have accepted that higher attitude to God 
and man which lies at the back of all good laws; 
you must not claim liberty and then proceed 
to administer not Christ’s law of love, but 
your own law of selfishness. The world would 


1 Kece Homo, p. 222. 


CHARACTER 155 


never be safe in granting you this freedom. 
And yet it can grant it in security to the men 
of goodwill and of helpfulness, for “‘love is the 
fulfilment of the law,” and more than the law’s 
demands will be fulfilled. 

Law may fill the cup up to the prescribed 
measure, but love will overflow it; the hireling 
serves the house within the limits of certain 
hours and wages, but the housewife supplants 
all limits with interest in her home, and be- 
cause she loves serves happily without stint; 
even the nurse can grow impatient with un- 
reasonable impositions upon her strength, but 
whoever heard of anxious love growing weary, 
or complaining at the lengthened hours, or 
resenting the endless tasks? Law says, “I 
have done a fair day’s work; no man can ask 
more of me than this.”’ Love asks what more 
it can do. Jesus was conscious of these differ- 
ences, and showed how while duty is satisfied 
when you give your coat, love’s impulse is to 
give the cloak also; how, when the law demands 
that you must go a mile and is fulfilled when 
you have done it, love swings along the road, 
singing and unbegrudging, and has finished 
two miles ere it realizes. 

In the measure in which this is the spirit of 
your life you may accept your freedom and 
administer your own law. But otherwise, not! 


156 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Vv 


We said that correspondence with environ- 
ment was one of the marks of life, and we have 
seen that Jesus aimed to effect such correspon- 
dence. By making love the guiding temper of 
character he showed us that which leads from 
life to life. The difficulty of continually re- 
newed adjustment to circumstances and of 
ever-varying application of the law of right 
relations, or love, to each new case as it arises, 
taxes and searches and thus develops the 
individual. But that is what Christ came to 
do—to produce life. 

But now we have reached a poimt where we 
can look for a moment at another definition of 
life—Bergson’s: 

“Life is freedom asserting itself within 
necessity, turning it to its profit.” 

The dead body is, shall we say, necessitated 
by physical and chemical laws; we know 
exactly what will happen to it. But when life 
is present, it stands up amid this reign of law, 
or of necessity, and, without altering any law, 
asserts itself as superior, learns how to use law 
to maintain and enlarge life, and proves its own 
freedom to such an extent that now no one 
can forecast what will happen. No one knew 
better than Christ that the great lawgivers of 


CHARACTER 157 


the ,centuries have been right, yet none knew 
better than he that man can lie dead, im- 
prisoned in laws not any one of which he may 
break. No room for enterprise, originality, or 
surprise: “‘faultily faultless, icily regular, splen- 
didly null—dead perfection!’ He called men 
to Life: “Life is freedom asserting itself within 
necessity, turning it to its profit.” Christ 
stands up amid the imexorable legalism of 
Judaism. It is life asserting itself within 
necessity. He will not “destroy the law” but 
neither will he consider whether he obeys it, 
any more than Byron will pause to see if he is 
keeping in step with the requirements of good 
poetry. The poet will not count his syllables 
as a mere versifier might; being a poet, he will 
have no need. Christ, having the spirit that 
fulfills the law, is not anxious about codes. 
He is free amid necessity, for the law is as 
permanent as God’s throne, but he is free in 
the midst of it because he has the spirit of life. 
Then he proceeds to show his freedom by using 
the eternal laws where others are simply con- 
trolled by them. As Life stands up free amid 
physical laws, selects them, combines them and 
then rides in triumph on the clouds because 
they serve him; as Life takes the laws of sound, 
which may not be altered, arranges and as- 
sociates them into unusual service of his com- 


158 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


mands until they sing in oratorio; so Life, the 
Life that Jesus has taught us how to have 
abundantly, asserts itself free within the un- 
alterable laws of duty. If to stand free amid 
the laws, and overrule them, and teach them 
to serve a spirit higher than themselves is life 
—if that is life, I can see why Jesus said, “I 
came that they may have life, and may have 
it abundantly.” 

There is no flat convention here, no previous 
assurance of what will happen. On the con- 
trary, no one can forecast what a Christian 
man will do, for life runs upon no iron rails 
of precedent. When he has finished with the 
moral laws he will have outsoared all that was 
ever dreamed of, he will have awakened a 
melody unheard before. The Christian charac- 
ter is thus one of colorful originality, of daring 
enterprise, of startling innovation. With un- 
warrantable departure from custom, he will 
invent a bill for the abolition of slavery; with 
scandalous indifference to whether it is written 
in the law or not, he will protest that wars 
must cease; though the law says he must not 
hurt his neighbor’s business, he actually will 
conceive the insane dream of helping his neigh- 
bor’s business even at the expense of his own; 
though the law commands him to keep his 
social life clean, he will commit the extravagance 


CHARACTER 159 


of foregoing on occasion his legitimate pleasure 
that he might help his neighbor to keep his 
life clean. It may not seem reasonable, nor 
according to law; it is according to law, though 
an unwritten law. It is Life, the abundant 
Life, free and superior to law because it swallows 
up the law in fullness as day swallows up the 
‘dawn. Under the law personality flows, like 
the Colorado River, chafing within high but 
narrow restraints. “I came that they may 
have life,” says Jesus, and life flows like the 
Nile within the banks and over the banks, know- 
ing not where its banks begin or end but carry- 
ing broad fertility and nourishment to every- 
thing it touches. 


VI 


“This is my commandment, that ye love one 
another.” As though he had said: “Moses 
gave his name to Ten Commandments, and 
they had to do with behavior; I give my name 
to one, and it neglects behavior and deals with 
the spirit; yet, like all the colors in the one 
golden light, all virtues lie in my one command 
to love.’ No one can know the New Testa- 
ment and suppose that Jesus ever meant that 
this temper of his could be shared by us with- 
out the open doors to heaven which he him- 
self so carefully kept free. He knew, as we do 


160 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


too, that he who would carry mankind in his 
heart must carry the Father also. Right rela- 
tionships with men nourish right relationships 
with God; and, on the other hand, he who 
neglects to entertain the Heavenly Guest will 
soon find his entertainment of Humanity 
artificial and forced. Jesus has but one basis 
for Christian character: ““Thou shalt love the 
Lord thy God with all thy heart, ... and 
... thy neighbor as thyself,’ and, that we 
may be clear in our thinking, let us repeat again: 
_ “Love is the energy of a steadfast will bent 
on creating fellowship.” Out of this is abun- 
dant life, freedom, enthusiasm, happiness. 
Go thou and learn this one thing, without 
which all else is as “‘sounding brass and a clang- 
ing cymbal.” This is the will of God made 
known in Christ, in his brave and gentle min- 
istry, in his wise and moving message, in the 
unstinting spirit that poured itself out unto 
death to save us all—this is the will of God. 
Avoid it not, nor seek a substitute, no, not 
temples nor prayers nor purities. Love is 
the Christian law, and “love is the energy of a 
steadfast will bent on creating fellowship.” 


‘And I remember still 
The words, and from whom they came, 
Not he that repeateth the name, 
But he that doeth the will! 


CHARACTER 161 


“And Him evermore I befiold 
Walking in Galilee, 
Through the cornfield’s waving gold, 
In hamlet, in wood, and in wold, 
By the shores of the Beautiful Sea. 
He toucheth the sightless eyes; 
Before Him the demons flee; 
To the dead He sayeth, ‘Arise!’ 
To the living, ‘Follow me!’ 
And that voice still soundeth on 
From the centuries that are gone, 
To the centuries that shall be! 


“From all vain pomps and shows, 
From the pride that overflows, 
And the false conceits of men; 
From all the narrow rules 
And subtleties of Schools, 
And the craft of tongue and pen; 
Bewildered in its search, 
Bewildered with the cry: 
‘Lo, here! lo, there, the Church!’ 
Poor, sad Humanity 
Through all the dust. and heat 
Turns back with bleeding feet, 
By the weary road it came, 
Unto the simple thought 
By the great Master taught, 
And that remaineth still: 
Not he that repeateth the Name, 
But he that doeth the will!’”! 


1H. W. Longfellow, “Christus: A Mystery,” Finale. Used 
by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company, Publishers. 


REVELATION 
I 


THERE is a persistent tendency in man 
jealously to cloister the religious truth he 
treasures, robbing it of liberty and locking it 
up In narrowness and mechanism. One would 
think that divine light was meant to be untram- 
meled enough, yet in no age has man been 
content to allow it to be so, but, on the con- 
trary, he has sought to confine it within the 
small boundaries of creeds or institutions or 
priesthood or books. To be sure, he has 
thought to protect the light by thus putting 
a shell about it, and he has at first been able 
to see that the precious thing is the light and 
not the shell. Invariably, however, this dis- 
tinction has grown dim with time, and the 
shell has come to be as sacred to him as 
the truth it was meant to guard, leaving him 
with the sacred nation, or the sacred church, 
or the sacred Book, issuing in the hard, exclu- 
siveness of the Jew, of the Roman Catholic 
and of the Protestant. 

Many fanatical Jews have died for their 
faith that in their chosen nation was deposited 


the truth while other peoples sat in darkness. 
162 


REVELATION 163 


Many Roman Catholic martyrs have shown 
how deeply they believed that the voice of 
Holy Church was the highest religious author- 
ity possible. To-day many Protestants are 
ready to protest with equal energy that it is 
not the nation or the church but the Book 
which is the infallible and perfect authority 
in faith and morals. The tendency still works. 
Each view has truth in it, or it could not’ 
have survived; its error lies in making all truth 
reside there. Who can read his Bible without 
feeling that God’s glorious light has been con- 
centrated in it as a burning-glass catches and 
focuses the rays of the sun? Yet how many 
there are who imagine they do the light honor 
by insisting that it shines here but nowhere 
else! A Roman Catholic or a Protestant, if 
told that he was cramping the truth would be 
shocked, pained, indignant; yet this is precisely 
what he tries to do. Instead of being universal 
and permanent as the sun, truth is made to be 
exceptional and intermittent as a lamp. 


Il 


Observe how vast is the conception of divine 
Revelation in the Prologue of the fourth 
Gospel: ““There was the true light, even the 
light which lighteth every man, coming into 


164 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


the world. He was in the world, and the 
world was made by him, and the world knew 
him not.” 

1. God has revealed himself in the heart of 
every man; there are no boundaries of tribe 
or tongue; one feels the shadow of no temple, 
hears the leaves of no book. Direct as the 
rays of the sun he has shone upon all races, 
the white and the black and the yellow, the 
brown and the red. 

2. This Light, this Life, is not merely uni- 
versal; there is something about it which may 
be described as cosmic, as wrought into the 
warp and woof of the physical universe; this 
Life of God, which everywhere has touched 
the life of man, is the same creative thing that 
made the worlds—thus mighty are the forces 
that have touched man’s heart. This cannot 
be gone into, but it indicates how impossible 
and how presumptuous it is to hope to enclose 
all this light in a church or in a Book. 

3. This Light was Christ. Do not dismiss 
this as an anticlimax, but examine it. The 
whole idea of Jesus in the New Testament is 
that he was a limited expression of Something 
infinitely vast, a concise though not neces- 
sarily exhaustive epitome of a Divine library, 
upon whose face one could look and see the 
glory of God, and who could say, “He that 


REVELATION 165 


hath seen me hath seen the Father.” The 
Light which has shone in “every man coming 
into the world”; which shone brighter among 
the Hebrews than among their contemporaries; 
which has shot golden rays through the ancient 
and the modern church, and which has bathed 
in beauteous and ever-ending splendor the 
pages of the Bible; the Light, moreover, which 
visited the sacred writers of India, which 
burned in the soul of Zoroaster and flashed 
from the soaring pinions of Plato—this time- 
less, universal Light burned deepest and 
warmest, flashed brightest and cleanest, was 
crowned kingliest and godliest, in Him of 
Galilee, Jesus Christ, our Lord. 

He is the supreme revelation, in whose light 
all others should be tested. The light that 
shone through others came through the painted 
windows of personal blemish, tainting the 
golden glory; only in him were the windows 
crystal clear. This is not said by special 
pleading but by mere comparison: compare 
and see; He invites you. The challenge still 
remains: “Which of you convinceth me of 
sin?” Who else ever dared to issue a 
challenge like that, much less who else ever 
could survive it? If ever the Light has reached 
us uncolored, clean from God, it is through 
the inimitable windows of Christ,—windows 


166 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


broadest spread in unparalleled genius, clearest 
wrought in unequalled religious comprehen- 
sions, and preserved unspotted in a miracle 
of moral cleanness and development. 

He is the Light of the World, not because 
from him shines a Light which shines nowhere 
else, but because through and from him shines 
the true Light which shineth everywhere. 
But what filters through chinks and crannies 
in others, and mingles with shadows, in him 
comes flooding. He seemed to know it: “He 
that followeth me shal! not walk in darkness, 
but shall have the light of life.” 

Jesus, then, is the norm, the rule, the reli- 
gious court of appeal before whom we bring 
our lesser light for disentanglement from error. 
We know he is the Truth, because our hearts 
answer to him. ‘Truth is self-attesting. Like 
answers to like. In the great religions of the 
world resides much which is neither in agree- 
ment nor in conflict with Christ; about that 
we can suspend judgment. But all have 
features in agreement with Christ. Where they 
are in conflict with Christ, we say Christ is 
the greater Master. 


Il 


To all this most of us will readily assent; 
it is when application begins to be made that 


REVELATION 167 


revolt results. It is seen to be proper to test 
Buddha or Zoroaster thus, but Moses or David 
must be spared! 

Yet Jesus himself did not hesitate to set 
his word above that of the Hebrew Scriptures: 
“It was said to them of old time, ... an 
eye for an eye, and a tooth for a tooth; but J 
say unto you....’ His followers have not 
always kept him so supreme; in anxiety for the’ 
authority of the whole of Scripture, fearing to 
allow that any part might be in error, many 
have been prepared to exhaust invention to 
prove it all of equal authority and exactness. 
When Abraham tells a falsehood, when Samuel 
hews “‘Agag in pieces before the Lord,” when 
the psalmist, in vindictive mood, prays that 
even his enemy’s prayer might be turned into 
sin, these unchristly things are glossed over 
and a pathetic attempt is made to justify them. 

But if Christ is right, they are wrong, and 
we shall not exalt our Saviour or advance his 
cause by refusing to see it. 


IV 


There are two ways of speaking of the Bible 
to-day which seem to me to be equally unfor- 
tunate. One is: “I believe in it from cover 
to cover; I believe every word is inspired by 


168 — CARDINALS OF FAITH 


God and without error.” The other is: “There 
is a lot in the Bible that I can’t accept; I don’t 
believe it is all inspired; much of it has to be 
taken with a grain of salt, and that’s the way 
I take it.” If the first is mechanical and 
unreal, the second often savors of the flippant, 
and is no truer than the first. If the first has 
rigid ideas about this wonderful Book, the 
second often appears to have no ideas at all. 

One almost blushes to have to mention a 
few elementary facts which, if only they were 
realized, would dismiss at once both the rigid- 
ity on the one hand and the flippancy on the 
other. The Bible is not a book, but a collec- 
tion of books, written in far different centu- 
ries and by people of widely different ideas 
and experience. It is a library, in which is 
represented, not the dead level of a religious 
homily, but all the gorgeous variety of one of 
the most remarkable literatures extant. There 
is history, poetry, drama, allegory, narrative, 
folklore: as though one had turned to English 
literature and bound together in one volume 
Paradise Lost, Hamlet, Green’s Short History 
of the English People, The Pilgrim’s Progress, 
Hymns Ancient and Modern, Stories of King 
Arthur, the Letters of F. W. Robertson, and 
other writings. But there would be _ this 
difference: in the English collection there would 


REVELATION 169 


be ne connecting theme, whereas in the Bible 
is the one sustained subject of religion. God 
has used every literary instrument and every 
kind of fact and, if you will, various sorts of 
fable, in order to reveal his light. : 

And that light has been like a gray dawn 
moving toward the perfect Day, which is 
Christ. What is to be gained by pretending 
that the light known to Moses or David was 
equal to that of Christ? or that all their opin- 
ions about God and human duty were correct? 
Hither they are wrong, at times, or Christ is! 

Yet again, and on the other hand, what is 
to be gained by saying that these old patri- 
archs were not inspired? The light they had 
was much superior to their times; if they are 
seen to have been in error when they are 
measured by Christ, they were not so when 
judged by the men and ideas of their own age; 
if in religion we see them to have been like 
babes trying to speak, and if their naive ideas 
tempt our smile, yet they learned their language 
from the Father, though they had not the 
tongue to speak it with purity and without 
a lisp. 

Can you tell all your heart to a child, or do 
you not, rather, impart it as the child is able 
to bear it? Thus did God, of necessity, deal 
with the children of men. If the psalmist is 


170 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


vindictive, it is because of his passion for 
righteousness, a strange thing in his age—and 
whence came it? It was light, twilight, much 
mixed at times with human shadows. It did 
not come from below. 

Let us admit the shadows; let us admit the 
light, for both are true. It is easy to be frank 
with ourselves since we have the bright day 
in Jesus; what disagrees with him is false; 
what fails to measure up to him is lacking, 
either in the Bible or out of it. 


V 


But what agrees with him, inside the Bible 
or out of wz, in past ages or in this, is the true 
light. For still the true light lighteth every 
man coming into the world. Some men are 
poor windows, others are better, and ever and 
anon arises one through whom the light streams 
wondrously. As the race climbs upward, and 
as men bring larger capacities and clearer 
windows, the light is sure to grow. What 
shall we say of those who speak as if God had 
ceased to reveal himself since the last word of 
the Bible was written? What a libel upon 
God! and what an ignoring of the plain facts 
of history! Where does the Bible condemn 
slavery? And yet when Wilberforce, and 


REVELATION 171 


Garrison, and Patrick Henry and Lincoln arise 
to free the slaves, we know it was by the 
light of God they did it. And then we see, 
what was hidden before, that this new light 
agrees with the Light of the World. Where 
does the Bible direct all nations to join to- 
gether in abolishing war? Yet when Woodrow 
Wilson becomes the mouthpiece of a world 
and calls the nations to a better way, we know 
it is by new revelations of God that he did it, 
and by the same revelations that we desired it. 
Method and detail are accidental; the essential 
thing is the spirit of that great movement; 
we know it is right, because it agrees with the 
spirit of Christ. 

And so God reveals himself as the centuries 
grow. In philosophies and sciences and cus- 
toms and dreams; in the sins of men and in 
their virtues, always the light is growing, 
Things and thoughts new to the world are 
happening every day, God is active every day. 
The preacher proclaims some things never 
found in the Bible, and he knows they are of 
God because they testify of Christ. The 
philanthropist gives his strength to help a 
cause never dreamed of in Bible days, and he 
knows this vision of service is of God because 
it is such as Christ would have. 

God’s unfolding of the Light is not finished, 


172 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


nor is the duty of man to keep the windows 
unshuttered heavenward. And ever we bring 
the new illuminations to Christ to find if they 
be of God. We know not from what quarter 
unexpected light may come, but unfearing— 
yet with discretion; with caution—yet with 
composure; we await all God has to offer by 
that Spirit of Truth which was promised as the 
Revealer of the things of Christ. 


IMMORTALITY 
I 


WHEN anyone announces that man’s sur- 
vival of what we call death has never been. 
proved my first impulse is to look at him in 
astonishment, but in a moment I understand 
him, and agree. I agree, because I realize 
that here is probably one of those who have 
not escaped from the stifling cage made for us 
by physical science, in which most of us have 
sat, like eagles with folded wings, eying wist- 
fully through the bars the ample spaces that 
are our heritage, but being prevented from 
them by the artificial, narrow and yet arrogant 
proof-methods in vogue in some quarters. 
With a docility unworthy of our powers of 
wing we have accepted confinement, relin- 
quishing the infinite horizons because, forsooth, 
they have not been proven to exist! Men 
who are still unescaped from this limited 
method of “proof” will of necessity tell you 
that immortality is not yet proved. For, of 
course, it is not proved by having been explored 


by the microscope, or by having been passed 
173 


174 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


through a prism broken up into rays and 
assessed, like the light, or by having been set 
out like a problem of figures, to be added, 
subtracted, multiplied, and divided until a 
mathematical result is achieved. But then, 
“nothing worthy proving can be proven, nor 
yet disproven’—not by these methods. The 
superficial matters of life can be captured by 
them, but not the deepest. Across, in fact, the 
very warp and woof of life must be written, 
“Not proven!’’—not by these methods. Love 
has not been proven, nor thought, nor virtue, 
and certainly not life beyond the grave when 
we have not yet “proved” that man exists on 
this side of it. “I think, therefore I am!’ 
cried the old philosopher, formulating testi- 
mony of his existence, and, though no one 
contests the soundness of his formula, whoever 
has yet been able to prove by actual demon- 
stration, safe from illusion and superior to 
mere hearsay or personal opinion (1) what 
thinking is, (2) that he does indeed think, (3) 
that it necessarily follows that if he does think 
he also exists? And yet if we allow that man, 
if he is to know anything, must take some 
things for granted, we shall have allowed that 
which may open the way not only to belief 
in man’s existence here but also to belief in 
his existence hereafter. 


IMMORTALITY 175 


il 


For the grounds of the two beliefs, or, rather, 
of the one belief of our personal existence now, 
and of the persistence of it, are really much the 
same. Normal man is intensely conscious of 
his personality, and man has always and 
everywhere been so. But man has similarly 
been sure that death does not conquer person- — 
ality. If it be retorted that some men have 
often doubted and denied the second, the 
reply is that men have often denied our present 
existence, and in both cases from an inquiry 
into the subject which has bewildered the 
eyes with accidentals whilst the essentials were 
lost. We analyze the body in vain for per- 
sonality; we watch the body die, and doubts 
arise; we are ready to say that personality no 
longer exists, though we have not “proved” 
it to exist at any time. So we grow befuddled, 
and handle delicate truth with thick fingers 
that can never grasp it; and all the while the 
normal man knows better, though he does 
not pause to realize that he knows. He 
walks out of the jungles where the feet sink 
in uncertain foundations, where the stars 
cannot penetrate and where the cobwebs 
gather about the brain,—he walks out under 
the high heaven, upon the wide plain, and 


176 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


feels the clean wind upon him, and in the simple 
joy of living he knows he cannot die. 

“A certain presage,” Cicero calls it, but it is 
a@ presage insisted upon by all our knowledge 
of ourselves, and that knowledge is based upon 
man’s serene, unshaken consciousness that he 
himself is something superior to death. He 
has watched his body change from his youth 
up; but he has not changed, except to grow. 
Not a cell of his body is now the same as when 
he was a youth: he, in fact, wears a different 
body; but he is not different: the brain that 
was the vehicle of thought six months ago no 
longer lives, but the thought does, and uses 
another brain. Change and flux swing around 
him, he watches the rise and fall, the going and 
coming of many things, yet nothing touches 
him, he remains himself. He does not argue, 
he simply knows he lives. The well-nigh 
universal belief in a “future life” is nothing 
else than the refusal of personality to confine 
itself within the artificial boundaries of time 
and _ place. 

Man feels himself to be independent of and 
superior to both. All his experience of time 
has been that he has conquered it, and if place 
has seemed to enchain him, he has been a mon- 
arch greater than his chains and only waiting 
to be freed. He carries in himself an instinct 


IMMORTALITY 177 


of something unfulfilled. He feels he lives in 
fragments rather than in completeness, and 
that there is something he has either missed 
or not yet arrived at. There are moments 
when he glimpses fairer landscapes than he has 
ever walked, nobler devotions and _ nobler 
powers than he has ever known; it seems to be 
himself that he is glimpsing, yet ere he has 
properly decided what it is he sees, the fair’ 
prospect has gone, and he has eluded himself. 
When a storm raves on the ocean he watches 
the wild grandeur until he is exhilarated, as 
if it were a symbol of vaster powers within 
himself—and yet he is left saddened. When 
beauty spreads its wonders in the night, in the 
daytime unfolds its panorama of mountain, 
sea, and river, man gazes, loves it—but is left 
hungering for what no earthly scene has ever 
been able to give him. Why can “the meanest 
flower that blows” move the poet to “thoughts 
that do often lie too deep for tears’? We are 
aware of presences we cannot describe, of 
truth for which our language was not made. 
The soul seems to be aware of a country 
fairer than flowers, of domain wider than 
oceans, of nobility more regal than mountains. 
These outward scenes sadden with a feeling of 
restriction, and the higher they soar with 
wonder itis only to confess the plainer that 


178 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


they cannot soar high enough to satisfy a man. 
Has this thing of life, called man, to falter in 
his step and “prove” to himself that he lives 
before he can believe that he does? And must 
he then proceed to debate whether he shall 
continue to live, suddenly distrusting the 
soul’s affirmation, which a moment before he 
had found sufficient? 


iit 


Death is never so ridiculous as when a man 
gets beyond seventy. Physically he is in 
the autumn; nature is finished, tired, fruited. 
But spiritually he is at the spring. He is like 
a sown field over which a green hue speaks of 
hidden seeds sprouting toward harvests yet 
hidden in the deeps of the future. He is a 
hundred times more vigorous than when his 
mind lay fallow at eighteen. The area of his 
interests is enormously wider. The experi- 
ences of life have been stimulating until he 
is like a forest set in motion by the first warm 
eall of spring, roots and buds and sap suddenly 
roused to a forward activity that nature does 
not intend to mock by checking. Shall he 
then say: “Now I am awake; now the roots of 
climbing worlds are struck; now there beat 
within me the strong pulses of the ocean; come, 


IMMORTALITY 179 


let me surrender my treasures—to the dark 
abyss! and yield myself up with all my powers— 
to oblivion! Unto this end have I been pre- 
pared, nature’s mightiest production, that I 
might, in a masquerade of dignity, exhibit on 
the stage—nature’s hollowest farce! I am a 
majestic prelude to—everlasting silence! I 
am accumulated wealth about to be lavished 
on—annihilation’’? 

To all this the profoundest intuitions of 
healthy man rush up into protest and denial. 
“No!” they ery, “It is artificial, and it is 
false!’ Yet, ask us to prove our right to 
protest and we cannot. As Emerson reminds 
us: ““We cannot prove our faith by syllogisms. 
The argument refuses to form in the mind. 
A conclusion, an inference, a grand augury 
is ever hovering; but attempt to ground it 
and the reasons are all vanishing and inade- 
quate.’ 


IV 


I place the emphasis here because here it 
belongs. If a man’s assurance of immortality 
means anything more than words to him, it 
will be because he knows rather than because 
he reasons. It is not quite enough to say 


1 “Tmmortality.” 


180 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


some do not know, for that is doubtful. It 
is probably no more true than it would be to 
say some do not know they exist here and 
now. The African bushman and the Aus- 
tralian black fellow are low types that are in 
no way so self-aware as the more reflective 
among us: testimony of our very existence 
varies in intensity, therefore, but is never 
wholly absent. It is not remarkable that the 
same should be true with respect to our aware- 
ness of immortality. There are stages of 
spiritual civilization; one does not go to a 
drinking house or to a gambling den to seek 
burning premonitions of life eternal. Mate- 
rialistic thinking and acting does not intensify 
such consciousness. While this great truth 
is not dependent upon our realization of it, 
realization is the master testimony to it. 
Where men live and think nobly there will 
consciousness of survival be cloudlessly affir- 
mative. 


V 


Therefore, if you would share the immortal 
hope, live greatly. But if you allow life’s 
finer intensities to relax until there is not that 
in you which of itself is testimony, by what 
may you be convinced? When Orpheus plays 
his harp a hundred harps may surround him, 


IMMORTALITY 181 


but only those whose strings are taut can 
catch the strain and answer it. The others 
with listless strings may be told that here is 
the master music of the world, but if they 
cannot know it for themselves, how shall it be 
proven? The music is all right but the strings 
need tightening! 

When a gentleman announced to me with 
scorn that he would not trouble to cross the’ 
road to hear a certain famous botanist lecture 
on flowers I did not argue. Why should I? 
Where should I begin? If a man sees no 
beauty in flowers, can I convince him? What 
is beauty, that I should analyze it for him? 
All the evidence of a botanist would not suffice 
to capture beauty and give it to a soul that 
could not see it for itself. 

We have our “evidences” for immortality, 
singly inadequate enough, but, taken together, 
capable of creating immense impressions upon 
some minds. But what shall we do? Shall 
we enumerate them to convince the unbe- 
lieving of the truth of immortality? Shall we 
speak, as Socrates did, of the indestructibility 
of matter and argue that if matter is unable 
to cease how much less the mind that, organ- 
izing and controlling it, ever proves _ itself 
superior and more worthy to live than the 
imperishable thing it handles? Shall we show 


182 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


how, though we have seen trees and flesh 
reach maturity and pass it and seem ready to 
die, we have never found a mind do so, its 
powers appearing always to enlarge and renew? 
Coleridge left behind him about two hundred 
outlines of books that he had never had time 
to finish. We all do some such thing as _ this. 
We leave fragments of dreams, fragments of 
hopes, of love, of aspiration, of character, of 
religion: we live in fragments. Shall we ask 
whether the spirit which produces outlines so 
majestic can be prevented from somehow, 
somewhere carrying them to completion? Or 
shall we, rather, say that an unfinished column 
is all of God’s plan for us, or a foundation 
without a building, or a lifted anchor without 
a voyage and a distant harbor?—Shall we say, 
with Dean Inge, ‘““There is a life which is below 
consciousness and there may be a life above 
consciousness?! Shall we reason from deep 
instincts and discontents of the soul, pre- 
saging life eternal, or shall we, perhaps, tell of 
the world’s greatest in all ages being convinced 
of life beyond the grave, as they stand like 
mountains, and above them that Mount Eve- 
rest, Jesus, catching already, the glories of the 
new day? 

Any one of these roads, leading us to the veil 
1 Outspoken Essays. First Series, p. 276. 


IMMORTALITY 183 


of the great mystery, and leaving us there 
hoping but unseeing, might do little more than 
hold us for a few delicious moments ere we 
decided with sadly shaking head that no delec- 
table country could possibly be beyond that 
veil, or many roads would lead to it. But 
when road after road converges to the same 
point and passes purposefully on, while we 
stand on this side of the mystery, watching, we - 
begin to say: “One road might have been an 
accident; but so many—? What pulsing Fact 
lies beyond the veil that, like a magnet, draws 
thus so many highways to itself, setting upon 
each its pointing sign-posts with the legend, 
*To the Life Immortal’ ”’? 

Of what value could such reasons be to one 
who has no witness in himself? They cannot 
convince. They might stimulate a sudden 
wish to share a conviction so desirable, but 
that would be very temporary unless life were 
aroused to become more reflective, devoted and 
responsible, for it is everyone who is “of the 
truth’ who hears the “Voice.” It is not on 
external botanical evidence alone but on inter- 
nal artistic quality that flowers are loved; 
it is not the perfect music only, but the strings 
in tune to receive it that leave no need for 
argument, but, rather, make place for enthu- 
slasm. 


184 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


“The wish that of the living whole 
No life may fail beyond the grave, 
Derives it not from what we have 
The likest God within the soul?” 
(“In Memoriam,” LV.) 


VI 


Therefore I return, still again, to this: all of 
us know quite well that the wide sweep of our 
personality cannot be “cabined, cribbed, con- 
fined” within the narrow compass of time, 
that the real part of us is immune from “famine, 
fire, and sword.” All of us know it, but with 
some the consciousness is dim. It is not 
reasoning first, but living, that brightens the 
inward testimony. “If I but had your faith 
I should begin to live your life,” said a lady to 
Pascal. “Begin to live my life,” replied the 
great man, “and you will soon come to have 
my faith.” 

As this assurance of the greater things grows 
it comes to be realized that if there is illusion 
and unreality anywhere, it is in the phenom- 
ena of this present world, including its passions 
and its pleasures. If anywhere there are 
mockery, intangibility, and “broken cisterns,” 
it is here, where too often the palate is tickled 
only that it might be nauseated, the feet 
allured that they might be bruised, the prizes 


IMMORTALITY 185 


offered that they might break the heart. ‘“Ex- 
cept a man be born from above he cannot see 
the kingdom of God.” As Martineau stated 
it: “The very gate of entrance to religion, the 
moment of its new birth, is the discovery that 
your gleaming ideal is the everlasting real.’ 
Do not suppose that I have been dealing with 
mere hopes and dreams, slender-based, ethereal. 
These are the realities—if any are. These 
are the realities, and they reveal their secrets 
to the nobility, but never to baseness; they 
liberate the soul from the bondage of this 
world’s complex and illusory masquerade, intro- 
ducing it to the iron lines of permanence. 
These realities never disappoint; they never 
mock; but, on the contrary, in old age they 
reaffirm the immortal assurance of youth and 
prepare the soul for new beginnings. 

Thus Theodore Parker, dying, was able to 
recite with deeper significance than ever the 
lines written by himself when young: 


“Oh welcome, then, that hour that bids thee lie 
In anguish of thy last infirmity; 
Welcome the toss for ease, the gasp for air, 
The visage drawn, the Hippocratic stare; 
Welcome the darkening dream, the lost control, 
The sleep, the swoon, the arousal of the Soul.” 


1 Study of Religion, vol. i, p. 12. 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 


I 


In one of his Messianic flights Isaiah ex- 
claims, “For that nation and kingdom that 
will not serve thee shall perish.” 

Yes; and we may add: “‘That international 
policy, that industrial legislation, that socio- 
logical doctrine that will not serve Christ shall 
perish; that league, or combine, or program 
that will not serve Christ shall perish; among 
the rich or the poor, the powerful or the weak, 
whether the plans be shaped at White House, 
or at the labor union, or at the board of direc- 
tors, that which will not serve Christ shall 
perish.” 

With whatever “boast of heraldry” or “pomp 
of power,” flourish of trumpets or weight of 
gold the plans may be framed and launched, we 
have lived now long enough to know, by the 
inexorable logic of plain events, that that 
which is not of Christ has already the worm 
at the roots, and that only that carries within 
itself the vigors of unquenchable life and 
triumph among men which is conceived in the 


spirit of Galilee. 
186 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 187 


For Christ it is who is referred to here, 
though Isaiah himself could hardly have known 
it. Isaiah could never have meant or dreamed 
that there lay in the arm of his people sufficient 
strength for all nations to feel it; he could not 
have felt confident that in the tribe known as 
Israel were the qualities bound to make all 
people serve it, or perish. Not in the tribe, 
nor in the arm of Israel, but in the presence of | 
God in Israel was his hope. If God dwelt in 
Israel, the peoples would pay homage to the 
God who dwelt there, or ignore him at their 
peril. Isaiah was simply proclaiming the Mes- 
sianic hope of his people. A strange hope it 
was, ancient, persistent, at first crude enough— 
being political and physical; steadily it shed 
its crudities as the years passed. The nation, 
trampled on, exiled, almost extinguished, yet 
clung with a tenacity that was surely inspired 
to the golden hope of a Deliverer to come, and 
a Kingdom that would extend unto the ends 
of the earth. 

Yet by the time Jesus came there were many 
shades of popular opinion concerning the 
nature of the Kingdom, the vast majority being 
assured that a warlike prince was about to 
appear, gifted with an ability of leadership, 
sufficient to cast off the Roman tyranny and | 
restore Israel to the glories of Solomon. 


188 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


It is not hard for us to detect in many of our 
current doctrines of the Second Advent a sur- 
vival of this old Jewish frame of mind. 

In this the Jews had really sunk below the 
elevated expectations of some of their ancient 
prophets. A more spiritual view, however, 
seemed to have prevailed alongside the other, 
although it was by no means so prevalent. 
And Jesus completed the evolution of this 
long dream of a kingdom of God, continually 
resisting the materialistic view and insisting 
upon the spiritual. The kingdom of God, he 
stressed, is withm, and unseen. Even his 
occasional use of picturesque and dramatic 
language must not be so interpreted as to make 
him seem to lapse at times into grosser con- 
ceptions; Jesus was too big to be inconsistent 
with himself, and the entire emphasis of his 
message was inward. Only too many of us 
possess a certain vulgar lust for pomp and 
display, and we shall not rest until we take 
our Lord and make him a King after the 
pattern of earth’s little potentates, have him 
wear a crown of stars and, accompanied by a 
shining concourse of angels, have him over- 
turn opposition by the conquering force of his 
mighty arm. In the days of his flesh, he was 
much grieved at his disciples’ disposition to 
read physical meanings into his poetry, and 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 189 


one can imagine the dismayed gasp of a John 
Bunyan or a John Milton should their high 
symbolism ever come to be treated with the 
dull literalism that has so often and so long 
perverted the teachings of our Lord. 

The long dreams of a kingdom of God 
culminate and clarify in Jesus. “My kingdom 
is not of this world,” he said; yet it is an this 
world. But the whole method and ideal of it © 
are other than what we have come to know as 
worldly. Jesus is himself the symbol of his 
kingdom, representing in himself all the essen- 
tials of his kingdom. Tif I should seek to epit- 
omize the marks of the kingdom of God, I 
think I should say they are Spirituality and 
Brotherhood—but these as Jesus represented 
them, for both have been so loosely used as 
to have become more or less emptied of their 
primal wealth. 


II 


Spirituality is not a matter of temperament; 
there is a distinction between spiritual and 
spirttuelle. It has no necessary connection 
with emotion, and not even with mysticism. 
Spirituality is a philosophy. It is opposed 
to materialism. A thing that could never be 
said of Jesus is that he was a materialist. 
Yet he was practical, active, constructive, 


190 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


but as he went, he saw! He saw the hand of 
God, believed in the plans of God, felt the 
heart of God. The universe was not barren 
matter; human life was not orphaned, un- 
visited, unguided. Jesus was one whose hands 
were filled with the tasks of the day, but 
whose reading of life and things was discerning 
of spiritual presences and purposes; he counted 
God in, not pausing in the realms of theory, 
but actually. Thus he never suffered the 
corroding influences that always eat at the 
soul where materialism has settled. 

And this attitude to life is vital to the king- 
dom of God. There is no hope for the world 
without spirituality—not the pseudo-religion 
that conventionally speaks the Divine Name, 
but never ponders its significance, that recog- 
nizes excellent sentiment but never shoulders 
responsibility. The religion that cannot direct 
behavior is not the kind that Jesus illustrated. 
But there is an apprehension of God that is 
warm and energizing; it is creative of new 
scales of value; it arouses new conceptions of 
human worth and destiny; it provokes new 
convictions that God is Governor, Nourisher, 
Redeemer. Moreover, it is not the product 
of a hermitage, or of a temperament, and it is 
open to the common man. Between it and 
materialism is the difference between life and 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 191 


death. It is a philosophy of life and it is one 
of the essentials of the kingdom of God. 


iit 


The other mark of the Kingdom is Brother- 
hood—as Jesus showed it. It overleaped 
boundaries of nation and class and sect; the 
Samaritan and the Jew, the rich and the poor, | 
the Pharisee and the peasant shared the un- 
stinted heart of him. In such a spirit there 
are obvious implications of service; one of his 
most affecting lessons was that “‘the Son of 
man came not to be ministered unto but to 
minister.” Such a spirit does not necessitate 
a supine ignoring of ugly facts, for Jesus saw 
sin with open eyes; neither does it require a 
scrapping of all words that do not purr with 
softness and geniality, for the words of Jesus 
could be barbed with truth as with flint, and 
could leap from the taut indignation of his 
soul like arrows from the string. Neverthe- 
less, his spirit was ever that of the brother of 
us all, and in no clash of principles, however 
violent, in no provoked criticism, however 
caustic, could that spirit in him be spoiled. 
And this is the spirit of the kingdom of God. 

The kingdom of God, then, is not a shape, 
an institution, or anything to be handled, any 
more than the life which dwells in a tree. But 


192 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


that plant life is the explanation of trunk and 
branch and leaf, and these can be handled. 
There is a living Spirit, which is the spirit of 
the kingdom of God, and only the presence 
of this spirit in the affairs of men can ever 
produce those institutions, laws, and prosper- 
ities which have been dreamed of from time 
immemorial as the Golden Age. When John 
saw the New Jerusalem coming down out of 
heaven from God, there came ‘a great voice 
out of the throne saying, Behold, the taber- 
nacle of God is with men.” ‘Then all things 
began to be made new, and when John was 
shown the New Jerusalem in detail, again 
God and the Lamb were the center of all things, 
the Temple, the Light. What can one say 
but that about a center like that such glories 
are bound to group? Give us a right spirit, 
with all that that registers in change of mind 
and heart, and we shall not be long in creating 
right conditions. 

The penury of the world is not from wicked 
economics but from poverty of soul, and 
when the soul is poor you cannot make con- 
ditions rich. The Romans hated kings as much 
as Americans do, and they boasted the lib- 
erties and benefits of their republic. Yet 
the later Roman republic abounded in tyran- 
nies and travail, so little can a form of govern- 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 193 


ment avail when the spirit of the people is 
wrong. God knows our world needs reforming; 
but there is not likely to be much reformation 
until we are relieved of the vast army of simple 
folks who think they can reform it from the 
outside instead of from within. The air is 
filled with the shouts of those who cry their 
wares, of those who offer their panaceas of all 
ills, guaranteed to disperse oppression and 
produce prosperity, happiness, and peace. The 
confidence of them! Republicans and Dem- 
ocrats; Bolsheviki and I. W. W.; Labor, 
Liberal, Conservative! A vast. amount of 
propaganda is conducted to-day as if we should 
have a new world if only men had plenty of 
money without any work. Be not so deluded! 
I have seen an ignorant man inherit money 
and travel the world over and see nothing and 
enjoy nothing; so little do conditions com- 
pensate for lack of character. Says Ruskin 
in a well known line: “There is no wealth 
but life: life, including all its powers of love, 
of joy and of admiration. That country is the 
richest which nourishes the greatest number 
of noble and happy human beings.” The 
common happiness and the common nobility— 
that, and that only, is the common wealth. 
But you will never get it by a reshuffling of 
the international or the economic or the indus- 


194 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


trial situation. The need is deeper than that. 

Because the spirit of modern life is wrong we 
are suffering a social system which grinds some 
men to powder. But let Labor smash the 
system and install another; what would we 
have except a new tyranny, unless Labor is 
animated by the spirit of brotherhood and is 
possessed of a spiritual conception of things? 
Neither Capital nor Labor is able to survive 
a frank test of the marks of the kingdom of 
God. Labor will chase a chimera so long as 
it misses the spirit of the Kingdom. It is 
not neglect of the church which is to be stressed, 
but neglect of God. Selfishness, commer- 
cialism, greed in rich or poor, in capital or 
labor, will never save the world. “By no 
political alchemy can you get golden conduct 
out of leaden instincts.” Czesar and Napoleon 
each created empires; Rienzi failed, from lack 
of worthy human material. The sculptor and 
the architect are crippled without substance 
suitable to their work. How are you going to 
build a new world out of humanity as we so 
often find it? Christ undertakes to set the 
material right, and that is to be done by us 
men accepting a right attitude to our Maker 
and also to one another. Thence are all 
nourishments and brotherhood. But apart 
from this is certain disappointment. 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 195 
IV 


The church is no professor of economics, but 
it is a prophet of the kingdom of God, and 
it is an observer of human life. And this it 
can aver, “That nation and kingdom that will 
not serve Christ shall perish!’ It does not 
hesitate to say it to Capital, which having 
ignored the spirit of spirituality and brother- 
hood has brought upon itself the raging waves 
of industrial unrest. It cannot withhold the 
same warning from Labor, which similarly 
missing too often a proper spirit, while 
achieving shorter hours and better conditions, 
threatens the very foundation of society and 
its own prosperity and existence with the rest. 
The only permanencies, constructive contri- 
butions, salvation, are those that express and 
carry the spirit of Christ. Observe the world 
to-day and see whether the things that redeem 
our hope be not those that make for healing 
and_ brotherhood. 

The leaven of the Kingdom is very active. 
Distinguished labor leaders in America and 
Britain are Christian men; ministers are con- 
cerning themselves with the economic welfare 
of mankind; a new literature has come into 
being; new dreams are forming, new disgusts 
are burning—disgusts at crass selfishness in 
any class, at shallow panaceas that do not 


196 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


cleanse the blood. Things are happening in 
our day which for excellence would have made 
our fathers gasp as at the incredible. Men 
with rough hands and rolled-up sleeves are 
feeling their way toward a healthier spirit; 
men with keen brains, others powerful in 
leadership, still others possessed of wealth 
and influence are throwing their weight toward 
creating a better, deeper spirit. 

The spiritual view of things is returning, and 
that alone can nourish genuine brotherhood. 
Jesus was offered the kingdoms of the world if 
he would employ a method indorsed by men 
from time immemorial. Because he believed 
in God he turned from that tried but false way, 
and set out to conquer the world by a deeper 
method and a truer. He could never have 
dared this had he not believed in God, but 
this one belief is enough to enable any man 
to challenge the example of ages when it con- 
flicts with what God stands for. The world 
that loses this sense of God loses the taste that 
can distinguish corrupt fruit from sound, and 
the daring that lays the ax to the root of the 
tree. There are men who are teaching our 
world to catch that spirit. Because Jesus 
believed in God he “‘endured the cross, despising 
the shame.” Such belief enables any man 
to follow his vision in face of the worst that 


THE KINGDOM OF GOD 197 


men can do, and to save the world in spite of 
itself. And this is what many men are doing 
to-day. ‘The kingdom of heaven is like unto 
leaven, which a woman took, and hid in 
three measures of meal—til it was all 
leavened.”” Throughout the world the leaven 
worketh. 

In the passionate midst of a great movement 
of reform I heard, some years ago, one of the 
most brilliant orators and most dauntless 
spirits produced by Australia, repeat to a vast 
audience some lines that may fittingly close 
our study. He had not long emerged from an 
operation which had become necessary partly 
as a result, it was thought, of his strenuous 
labors in the cause of righteousness, and when 
I saw him on this occasion, the most dividing 
force in the country, beloved and hated, a 
storm center and clearing the air like a storm, 
he limped onto the platform holding his side 
which had never properly healed. He is 
dead now, but the radiant message of spiritual 
vision and faith flung out that day by that 
golden voice and peerless spirit speaks to 
us here seven thousand miles away in 
distant America, as an example of the death- 
lessness of the word of hope and life. In the 
midst of antagonism and hate, these were his 
words: 


198 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


“Can you see the great wheels turning? 
Can you see God’s lightning burning 
In the tireless dynamo? 
Can you catch the hum of power? 
Catch the keynote of the hour? 
As the cap of death is settled 
On the forehead of the foe! 


‘‘Wheels of destiny are turning; 

Fires of faith are hotly burning; 
God is on the giving hand; 

Giving courage to the fighter, 

Giving death-blows to the smiter, 
Giving leaders to our land, 

Who will keep the great wheels turning, 

Who will keep the white truth burning, 
Till the dread foe is consumed. 


‘‘When the foe falls prone forever, 
Heaven may know, 
Our earth can never 
Know, a greater shout of glory 
Than shall usher in the story: 
How the children, with their mothers, 
Sweethearts, fathers, friends and brothers, 
All are safe! O, Nations, 
Hear ye! From all evil! 
Faint hearts, cheer ye! 
God’s own hand these wheels are turning! 
God’s own heart this fire burning! 
The Eternal Dynamo!” 


PROGRESSIONAL 
I 


Tue church has always believed that Jesus 
meant something significant when he spoke of 
a Spirit about to be granted who should take 
of the things of Christ and show them unto us. 
In the book of Revelation we find that Spirit 
already active, speaking to the early church: 
‘He that hath an ear let him hear what the 
Spirit saith.”’ 

There is peril in dullness of hearing. Cas- 
sandra poured her prophecies into ears that 
could not hear, but the warnings were true, and 
the noble towers of Ilium bowed their proud 
foreheads to the Greek. The Soothsayer 
warned Ceesar of his fatal day, the ides of 
March, but provoked only a smile from the 
great man. “The ides of March are come,” 
Cesar laughed as he passed to the Senate. 
“Ay, Cesar, but not gone!” replied the Sooth- 
sayer, portentously. Cesar could not hear, 
and ere that day was done Cesar was dead. 
The voice had spoken, but there were ears 
that were holden. Wherever the Church of 


Jesus Christ has grown deaf to that Spirit 
199 


200 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


which tells of the things of Christ, a deadly 
malaise has fallen. 

The Spirit speaks unto the churches, and 
some there be who deem they do him honor 
by shutting the ears and crying, as the familiar 
gospel song has it, “It was good for our 
fathers, and it’s good enough for me!’ It 
was good for our fathers, but he who has 
not advanced beyond the fathers, as they did 
beyond theirs, is like the father of Abraham 
who stayed in Haran and died there; he died 
in the land of his fathers, indeed, but his son 
went onward into a new world and a vast inher- 
itance, carrying with him the best that his 
fathers had given. What man among us can 
believe at forty precisely as he did at fifteen? 
If he can, alas for him! Then the years have 
taught him nothing, the Spirit has spoken in 
vain; he may as well not have lived. 

Yet your belief of to-day is not a break with 
the past but the crown of it. It is not a 
waxen model of a flower, man-made, artificial 
and unconvincing; it is the inevitable outblos- 
soming of all the processes of your tree of life. 

Can the church have in it the Spirit of life 
and truth, and yet not grow? Will you insist 
that I stand where Calvin stood? or Wesley? 
or another? I shall go further because they 
stood where they did, outgrowing them as all 


PROGRESSIONAL 201 


things livmg must outgrow the past, the more 
when that past was vigorous in health. 

Yet shall the blossom look down and despise 
the branch and trunk? Shall any man to-day 
forget that he simply blossoms upon the tree 
of the centuries and has no explanation of 
himself apart from the past? Writes H. H. 
Powers in the “Atlantic” for April, 1923: 
“Trust not the man who lightly turns his back — 
upon the past. Trust, rather, him who comes 
not to destroy but to fulfill. Fulfillment 
means destruction just the same, but oh, such 
a different destruction!’ Starlight might be 
destroyed by catastrophe to the stars, but it 
is destroyed every morning by the rising of the 
sun. The living Spirit in the church dis- 
preads an increasing light of Christ, and unto 
the end of time, whether they like it or not, the 
children must resign, as inadequate, truth 
which was enough for the fathers. 

The spirit of the forest moves in a tree with 
restless energy, and the tree grows stout of 
trunk and breaks into leaf and flower. It is 
never two seasons the same, and yet it is never 
essentially different. It is always a tree; the 
type remains. But so certainly as that spirit 
is the spirit of life the tree cannot be static. 
You cannot play under it as a boy and then 
return after many years to behold it again. 


202 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


Though it is the same tree, it has altered with 
the seasons, and so have you. Go to the pet- 
rified forests if you would be sure of what you 
are to find. There, from year to year, is no 
change. With perfect security you can tell 
your friend what he is going to see. If you 
wish you may say: “My father roamed among 
these ancient forests, and he brought me to 
them when I was a boy. I recall how awed 
I was by their static grandeur. Here they 
have been from age to age. Neither frosts nor 
suns affect them; they defy the elements, and 
are unchanged yesterday, to-day and forever. 
Come, and behold something that is not fickle, 
not unsure.” Verily, for what is less fickle 
and more assured than death! Of all the trees 
in the wildwood, only that tree or that branch 
is static which has lost its life, and these, men 
gather into ovens and they are burned. 

The living Spirit, restless and vocal in the 
Church of the Lord Christ, is the very genius of 
change. Where any branch of the church 
loses its capacity to change, it abides for a 
while as a contrast and a warning, and then 
falls. 

II 

Not least arresting among the Master’s 
similes of the Kingdom was that when he said: 
“Therefore every scribe who hath been made 


PROGRESSIONAL 203 


a disciple to the kingdom of heaven is like unto 
a man that is a householder, which bringeth 
forth out of his treasure things new and old” 
(Matt. 13. 52). The striking element here is 
that any scribe should ever, under any circum- 
stance or by any chance, bring forth out of 
his treasure anything new. One has only to 
understand the function and spirit of the 
Hebrew scribe to realize this. The work of 
the scribes was to make careful copies of the 
Hebrew Scriptures for distribution, and their 
work was greatly reverenced. Their order 
began with Ezra, who returned from the Baby- 
lonish exile to find the sacred writings scattered 
and, in part, destroyed. He had them reas- 
sembled, reproduced, and copied, the copyists 
becoming known as scribes. Thereafter the 
scribes continued to play an important rdle. 
Thus began the era of the scribe. 

This era of the scribe had been preceded by 
that of the prophet, in every sense a far greater 
era. The prophets seldom wrote, and when 
they did, it was the message stirring in their 
hearts that they wrote, not the message that 
had stirred the heart of some distant ancestor, 
however great. If they quoted him, it was 
that they might indorse his word and apply 
it to their own age. The contrast between the 
two eras is great. That of the prophet rings 


204 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


with daring challenge of wrong; it is original, 
progressive, passionate, living intensely in its 
own time; that of the scribe is bound to the 
past; it cannot be original because its business 
is to quote the fathers; it cannot be progressive 
because its business is to remain faithful to 
the measure of light possessed by a previous 
generation; it cannot be really passionate, be- 
cause its business is not to think until the fire 
burns but, rather, to accept and to copy. The 
prophet was venturesome, independent; the 
scribe was cautious and a lover of precedent. 
When the prophet would strive for the kingdom 
of righteousness it was with invincible faith 
in the ever-living, ever-present God; therefore 
with an energy that was often fierce he would 
even overturn practice and convention, where 
such seemed obstructive, and carve new paths 
in the name of the Lord. But the scribe, 
worshiping the past, would reform his times 
by consulting the methods and messages of 
other generations, painfully copy down all the 
prophets had said, and, supposing there was 
nothing to be added, with flat and stale pre- 
cision would publish the wonders that God 
wrought in the great yesterdays; but he would 
never start up with the inspired conviction 
that God is also the God of our to-days and our 
to-morrows. ‘The prophet might not be so 


PROGRESSIONAL 205 


exact, so precise, so safe, but he was more 
colorful, more dynamic. 

Emerson! tells us how the world demands 
of us conformity to its customs and creeds. 
That is the type of the scribe—careful of con- 
formity, regarding, scandalized and_ horrified, 
any breakaway from the rule. But Emerson, 
urging faithfulness to our own light and to 
our own God, adds: ““He who would be a man ° 
must be a non-conformist!” That is some- 
what the type of the prophet, who asked not 
what was the fashion, nor how the fathers 
phrased their faith, but, rather, what was true 
for themselves and their own times. “He who 
would gather immortal palms,” cries Emerson 
again, “must not be hindered by the name of 
goodness but must inquire if it be goodness.” 
Inquire! Explore! Your scribe does not ex- 
plore—he accepts! 


iit 


Judaism, at the time of Christ, might almost 
be described as being scribe-cursed. “The 
law and the prophets” were read, learned, 
quoted, debated, and deferred to with a rever- 
ence which had degenerated into superstition. 
The teachableness that sits respectfully at the 
feet of the great days that are gone that it 


1 Self-Reliance. 


206 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


may add wisdom learned there to the wisdom 
taught by latest knowledge and experience was 
absent, and in its place sat the obduracy that 
makes the ancient a fetish, shuttering the mind 
to every voice that speaks not down the long, 
familiar aisles of the past, admitting no wis- 
dom that is not hoary with years, and for- 
getting that it is out of the mouth of some 
new-born babe of knowledge that God some- 
times ordains strength. Therefore that gener- 
ation lacked largeness, virility, freshness, 
enthusiasm. 

Into this world came Jesus, a new and whole- 
some experience. Unlike the rest, he spoke 
the truth as he saw it, even daring to alter 
“the law’? where he had something better to 
offer. That is why they said “he taught as 
one having authority—not as the scribes.” 
They quoted, he proclaimed. They went back 
to Moses, who lived in a different time from 
theirs and which knew not their problems. 
Jesus did not despise Moses, but neither did 
he pervert the worth of that great man by 
making him the dead end of progress; he 
could on occasion quote Moses with confidence 
because he had learned to quote the supreme 
authority of all—‘‘the words which thou gavest 
me I have given unto them.” 

But Jesus felt no impulse to scorn the scribes, 


PROGRESSIONAL 207 


except where they had hardened into something 
actively injurious. Instead, he could not have 
been unconscious of the value of their work, 
and it would seem from the parable we quoted 
that he was less inclined to alter their back- 
ward look than to add to wz a forward. He 
said that the scribe, when he became a dis- 
ciple of the kingdom of heaven, became as a 
householder preparing to minister to some 
wayfarer. From his stores the householder 
produces some well-known staple foods; also 
he brings forth some newer and improved. 
Isaiah ate wheat and so will this wayfarer, 
but advancement in cookery, say, will not be 
despised by him these centuries after Isaiah. 
So, Jesus seems to teach, the man who lived by 
rote, attached too closely to the past, confident 
only when he could fortify himself with prece- 
dent and example, on entering the kingdom of 
heaven becomes imbued with a larger spirit. 
Still retaining the essence of old truth, he 
discovers new. To feed the present age which, 
like a wayfarer, passes his door, knocking ere 
it goes, he will bring from his treasury “things 
new and old,’’—new truth and old. 


IV 
Thus it became apparent that the kingdom 
of heaven was not to find its type in the scribe, 


208 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


but in Jesus. It was to be a kingdom of enter- 
prise, passion, originality, inspiration. “Miul- 
ton, thou shouldest be living at this hour,” 
wrote Wordsworth; in his youthful enthusiasm 
over the French Revolution, convinced that 
so splendid a lover of freedom as Milton could 
never be alive in any generation without 
having something excellent to say in humanity’s 
cause, and something intensely suitable not 
only to the days of Cromwell but to any 
moment in which he should live. The scribe’s 
conception of Milton, however, would, rather, 
be that he has completed his message, having 
nothing further to say, and certainly nothing 
new. To the scribe, however valiantly truth 
may have striven and prevailed in days long 
ago, we must not expect her to be audible 
now. Instead, we should reverence her tra- 
dition and rear statues to preserve the likeness 
of the pure, strong glory that was. From 
age to age men may look at that face, but they 
will ever see an expression that is the same. 

. But the Kingdom of which Christ is Lord 
does not regard truth as a statue, perfect in 
curve and poise, but static; rather, truth is as 
a Milton who is neither dead nor inactive, who, 
so long as it live, must speak. Glorying in 
the achievements of truth in the past, the 
scribe that hath been made a disciple of the 


PROGRESSIONAL 209 


kingdom of heaven invites truth to break silence 
in the present; he is prepared for the unex- 
pected and to be surprised, not because truth 
is likely to be false to its own type, disap- 
pointing all we have been led to expect of it, 
but because not being like a statue, but, 
rather, like a living person, it changes its 
expression, adjusts itself, unfolds new deeps. 


V 


Had this been better realized, there had 
been fewer panics in the church and fewer 
lapses into infidelity on the part of men because 
of new light. In the twentieth century, after 
the lessons that have crowded the generations 
and written themselves, one would have 
thought, as with a pen of iron upon the heart 
of humanity, we still have our heresy hunts, 
and still our attitude, too often, is not to 
“prove all things,” and not to ask “Ts it true?” 
but rather, “Has it the sanction of the past?” 
Distant fields look green and the far past 
seems strangely God-filled. But go back and 
stand with those giants of God whose words 
we love to quote to-day, see how few blades 
were then green after all. Watch those men 
straining to apprehend a God who seemed to 
speak all too uncertainly, and observe those 


210 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


nourishers of the world stoned angrily with 
words plucked from the “fathers.” The 
loneliest, the bravest, the divinest, but also 
the most hated and the most feared have in 
all ages been the prophets of the new day, in 
which men walk in new extensions of the old 
paths and speak, in new words, the old truth. 

The world has ever stoned its prophets. 
But this occurs to one: What if they had been 
allowed their ministry? What if the world 
had not sawn Isaiah asunder, and struck the 
head from Paul? What if the flames had not 
silenced John Huss and Servetus and Latimer? 
The truth is living still, and marching still, 
“in spite of dungeon, fire, and sword,” but 
is it quite as wondrous as it might have been? 
Suffer we nothing from this wholesale mur- 
dering of the saviours and leaders sent unto 
us? If we had welcomed and pondered the 
prophets of “‘the Christ that is to be,”’ do you 
think we should have this absurd suspicion 
between religion and science? this imagination 
that faith flourishes best in the cradles of 
ignorance? this present international tangle? 
this fratracidal, internecine struggle? §Soc- 
rates and Sir Thomas More, and all their kind 
—ah, we could not well spare such brains and 
spirits as those! Whatif the world had allowed 
them to give us all their message? Was it a 


PROGRESSIONAL 211 


little thing to slay such men? We have 
suffered more than they—we are a thousand 
years behind the times! 


VI 


But there is another side to this. The 
spirit of the kingdom is not a wanton wrecking 
of the past and a crazy worshiping of novelty. 
It is inevitable that religion be conservative; 
responsibility cannot afford to be harebrained. 
Having decided that Newton’s theory of 
gravitation is probably correct, science is not 
likely to capitulate a theory that has done 
good service for years simply because Einstein 
challenges it. Yet science will listen to Ein- 
stein, and test his claim and accept it if it 
holds. This, we may hope, will become much 
more the spirit of religion, which has nothing 
to fear from frankness. 

Howbeit, this modern jangle of new voices 
is not all made up of voices prophetic. At 
the behest of the latest unripe experiment or 
speculation must experiences of centuries 
decamp? We shall feed our wayfaring age 
upon poor fare if, without something better, 
we deny it the food proven through centuries 
of toil and sorrow to be good for the soul. 
Are the old words “God” and “Pardon,” 


212 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


“Christ”? and “Heaven,” “Prayer” and ‘“‘Sal- 
vation” to yield simply because we have added 
“Evolution” and “Psychology,” “‘Astronomy” 
and “‘Eugenics,” “Geology” and “Sociology?” 
Long before Astronomy was telling us the 
marvels of the skies, those old words were 
bringing mysterious dawns to human darkness 
and teaching souls to range the universe 
in a new-found vastness. Long before Geology 
unfolded the story of the rocks, those old 
words were shaking the foundations of the 
world into spiritual dislocation and rearrange- 
ment. It is by these words that men have 
“stopped the mouths of lions .. .” that men 
have cried: “He brought me up also out of an 
horrible pit...’ that men have died as 
Moody did, saying: “I see earth receding, 
heaven is opening, God is calling me!” or as 
did Beecher, eager for new worlds to conquer and 
saying, ““Now comes the mystery!’ Will you 
have us believe that suddenly all this has been 
discovered a blunder, a twilight mist that can- 
not abide the risen sun of new knowledge? 


Vil 


It will appear to you that this makes both the 
fascination and the difficulty of Christian work 
to-day. Sagacity, vision, acumen were never 


PROGRESSIONAL 213 


more needed in companionship with religious 
devotion. The world will dare to think, 
whether the church dares or not, and unfor- 
tunately unless the church leads the way in 
conserving the treasures of the past, and 
inviting the treasures of the future, we shall 
simply find men scorning us and the past we 
hug too dearly, and embracing, without dis- 
crimination, the future. which we _ suspect. 
In a world lost in a wilderness the church may 
yet become as a guiding pillar of cloud toward 
a Promised Land. But the task will be 
arduous, and not lacking in peril. Heart 
alone will not do it, nor brain alone. It will 
demand both, and tax them to the limit. 

For that reason one can only regret some- 
thing akin to tragedy whenever the church 
is compelled to accept for its ministers young 
men whose piety is beyond challenge but whose 
type is otherwise weak. We have not had 
too much education in religious emotionalism, 
but we must insist that it be experienced by 
men who are also capable of coolly using their 
brains unwarped by it. No _ devotional 
abandon can long compensate for insult to a 
world’s intelligence, and the penny of our 
wisdom will be small pay for the ultimate 
pound of our foolishness. As has been said, 
“the way to make the next generation rife 


~— 


214 CARDINALS OF FAITH 


with infidelity is to feed the present gener- 
ation on credulity.”” Men of broad brows 
and keen eyes are necessary for the task we 
have in hand; they must also be able to stand 
upon their own feet, know their own heart 
and their own God, and behind lips that are 
framed in kindness there must be teeth able 
to set in firmness, so that the protests sure 
to be met from many excellent quarters will 
not dismay. Of such a build were the apostles 
and prophets of old. 

When Greece was arming for the Trojan 
War it was insisted that young Achilles must 
be found. I[t was not Ulysses’ display of 
glittering trinkets that revealed him as the 
warrior-hearted among the women, but the 
blue gleam of an unsheathed sword and the 
proud bravery of a crested helm. To such the 
spirit of the youth made eager answer, and 
Ulysses, observing, smiled and claimed him 
for the labors of a man. 

The times are searching us out! They 
offer their beads and mirrors and laces, pretty 
playthings for the soft-spirited; but they are 
spreading before us also the strong steel of 
honor, of sacrifice, of enterprise, faith and 
endurance. The times are searching for men, 
and only the virile spirited will answer. In 
these days, so strenuous in matters of faith, 


PROGRESSIONAL 215 


the work of Christ will be done by those who, 
knowing the stern entail of the long campaign, 
the hard knocks, the lonely vigils, are prepared 
to accept all in the holy name of him who said 
“TI am—the Truth!’ Men of such kind will 
follow him, although knowing the while that 
those who would slay them will think they do 
God service! 


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